KARL GRUBER, WIKIMEDIA
In a study published yesterday (April 2) in PNAS, researchers describe how they genetically engineered a strain of brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to produce noscapine, a nonnarcotic cough suppressant produced naturally by opium poppies. The scientists included an array of genes from various organisms to build the biosynthetic pathway in the yeast.
“This is a technology that’s going to change the way we manufacture essential medicines,” says coauthor Christina Smolke, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University, in a statement. “Traditionally, we’ve gotten our medicines from the natural world, mainly from plants. But the plants’ molecular assembly lines have evolved to optimize the plants’ survival, not to churn out buckets of one substance we humans want to get our hands on.”
Smolke and her colleagues inserted ...
