Morphine Can Be Brewed Just From Sugar Yeast, Even Without Poppies
Morphine and other drugs, including antibiotics and anti-cancer meds can be made even if you don't have poppies! However, this point comes with a warning----the discovery may lead to homemade medication as well as other drugs, according to rt.
Hence, scientists could synthesize reticuline, a chemical compound that was found in a number of plants, including poppies, from tyrosine, derived from glucose.
The findings of the probe were led by UC Berkeley bioengineers and specialists from Concordia University in Montreal, and the article explaining the findings was published in Nature Chemical Biology, a scientific journal.
"What you really want to do from a fermentation perspective is to be able to feed the yeast glucose, which is a cheap sugar source, and have the yeast do all the chemical steps required downstream to make your target therapeutic drug," said the UC Berkeley bioengineer John Dueber, a member of the research team.
Hence, brewing morphine could become easier and permit scientists to tweak each of the steps to develop new kinds of painkillers, according to bbc.
However, scientists are trying to sensitise regulators and law enforcers to the flip side---home-made drugs, which may be harmful.
Dueber agreed that the team is assessing the "timeline of a couple of years, not a decade or more," when homemade brewing of sugar into morphine without opium poppies could be made.
"The time is now to think about policies to address this area of research. The field is moving surprisingly fast, and we need to be out in front so that we can mitigate the potential for abuse."
An additional concern for the technology "is that once the knowledge of how to create an opiate-producing strain is out there, anyone trained in basic molecular biology could theoretically build it."
Policy analysts Kenneth A. Oye and J. Chappell H. Lawson from US and Tania Bubela from Canada have released their commentary in Nature Chemical Biology journal, which asks that technology be regulated.
"Anyone with access to the yeast strain and basic skills in fermentation would be able to grow morphine-producing yeast using a home-brew kit for beer-making," they wrote.
