Medicinal chrysanthemum
Wormwood genes were inserted into the chrysanthemum
This is necessary for the first Russian medicine for malaria
Molecular biologists from Russia and Israel inserted wormwood genes into the genome of chrysanthemums, which was the first step towards the creation of domestic medicines for malaria. This is reported by the press service of the Russian Science Foundation (RNF) with reference to an article in the scientific journal Plants (Firsov et al., Agrobacterium-Mediated Transformation of Chrysanthemum with Artemisinin Biosynthesis Pathway Genes).
"Wormwood extract is able to fight malaria, but wormwood grows in a rocky, steppe area. In other climatic conditions, there is very little of it. Therefore, in order to obtain a medicinal substance in volumes sufficient for widespread production, we need to focus on modern methods of molecular biology," said Sergey Dolgov, one of the authors of the work, head of the laboratory of the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Malaria is one of the most common infectious diseases of humans. ITS pathogens are unicellular parasites from the genus Plasmodium. There are four most common types of plasmodium in nature. One of them, Plasmodium vivax, is also found in the countries of Eurasia, which are located in the temperate climate zone.
For a long time, doctors and scientists believed that malaria had been eliminated on the territory of the former USSR and European countries. However, at the turn of the century, malaria outbreaks began to occur again, first in Tajikistan and other Central Asian republics, and then in the Moscow Region and other regions of Russia, as well as in Greece and other European states. This raised the question of creating a Russian drug to combat this disease for domestic researchers.
Dolgov and his colleagues have made a big step in this direction. They have created a new transgenic variety of chrysanthemums that can produce artemisinin molecules. Now it is the most effective means for the destruction of malarial plasmodium.
Chinese pharmacologist and laureate The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to Tu Yu this substance is made from hairs on the surface of the leaves of annual wormwood back in 1972. Artemisinin suppresses malaria well, but it is quite expensive to produce it, since wormwood grows in very specific conditions.
Therefore, in accordance with the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO), artemisinin is now used only in combination with other antimalarial drugs. Russian scientists have found out how to speed up the production of this medicine and make it cheaper. The researchers tried to transplant the genes responsible for the synthesis of artemisinin in wormwood cells into the DNA of chrysanthemums, another plant from the Asteraceae family.
Scientists hoped that, thanks to family ties, chrysanthemum would "learn" to use wormwood genes and produce an antimalarial drug in large quantities. For this operation, biologists used bacteria of the species Agrobacterium tumefaciens, which can penetrate plant cells and change the structure of their DNA.
With the help of these microbes, scientists inserted four wormwood genes into the chrysanthemum, which are directly involved in the synthesis of artemisinin, as well as one yeast gene. As the subsequent observations showed, the gene transplantation was completed successfully. All the DNA sections were integrated into the chrysanthemum genome, as a result of which the chloroplasts of its leaves began to produce a few antimalarial drug molecules.
Now scientists are growing the sprouts of these "medicinal" chrysanthemums and are working on two new important problems – it is necessary to increase the amount of artemisinin in their leaves and create techniques with which it will be possible to isolate molecules of this substance from plant biomass. The solution of both problems will open the way for the appearance of the first Russian antimalarial agent, the researchers conclude.
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