British geneticists have developed a new transgenic tomato variety whose pulp contains large amounts of resveratrol, a powerful antioxidant from red wine that can slow aging and the progression of Alzheimer's disease, according to an article published in the journal Nature Communications.
“Medicinal plants are often difficult to grow and usually take a very long time to produce the substances we need. Our research provides us with a fantastic platform for the rapid production of these nutrients in tomatoes. They can be extracted directly from the juice of these tomatoes,”said Yang Zhang of the John Innes Center in Norwick, UK.
Zhang and his colleagues took the first step towards the production of essential biochemicals and drugs using conventional crops by studying the work of one of the genes of the Arabidopsis thaliana, a wild relative of cabbage, which scientists use as a plant analogue of laboratory mice.
The genome of this plant, scientists say, contains the AtMYB12 gene, which contains instructions for assembling a protein that controls how many substances "linked" to it will be assembled by plant cells.
The authors of the article transplanted this piece of DNA into the genome of ordinary tomatoes and modified it in such a way that it stimulated the cells of the fruit to produce two beneficial substances - the antioxidants resveratrol and genistein. Both of these substances are found inside grapes and garden beans, from whose DNA scientists have extracted the genes responsible for their synthesis, and transplanted them into the genome of tomatoes.
As the first experiments with similar GMO tomatoes showed, they are capable of producing medicines in industrial quantities - for example, one tomato contained the same amount of resveratrol as there is in 50 bottles of red wine, and as much genistein as there is in 2.5 kilograms of beans …
Such a great success, according to Zhang, suggests that a similar technique can be used to produce other herbal components of medicines, which today remain too expensive due to problems with growing raw materials. Such "medicinal GMOs" can be used for their intended purpose, both by simply eating them and extracting the active substance from them, scientists conclude.