'Breaking Bad?' - Engineered yeast paves way for home-brew heroin. (Nature).
Biotechnology is about to make morphine production as simple as brewing beer. A paper published on 18 May in Nature Chemical Biology1 reports the creation of a yeast strain containing the first half of a biochemical pathway that turns simple sugars into morphine — mimicking the process by which poppies make opiates. Combined with other advances, researchers predict that it will be only a few years — or even months — before a single engineered yeast strain can complete the entire process.
Besides giving biologists the power to tinker with the morphine-production process, the advance could lead to more-effective, less addictive and cheaper painkillers that could be brewed under tight controls in fermentation vats. At the same time, it could enable widespread, localized production of illegal opiates such as heroin, increasing people’s access to such drugs. Recognizing that danger, the synthetic biologists behind the work have already opened a discussion of how to prevent the technology’s misuse without hampering further research.
“It’s easy to point to heroin; that’s a concrete problem,” says bioengineer John Dueber of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the latest research. “The benefits are less visible. They are going to greatly outweigh the negative, but it’s hard to describe them.”
Over the past decade, several research teams have tried to coax microbes, including the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the lab-workhorse bacterium Escherichia coli, into making plant-derived drugs. The antimalarial drug artemisinin, originally derived from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), is now produced commercially in yeast.
The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), as the only commercial source of morphine and opioid painkillers such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, is an obvious target for bioengineering.
The crop must be grown in highly regulated conditions, in only a few countries. Outside those boundaries, in places such as Afghanistan, it is grown to supply the illegal heroin trade.
Producing opiates in industrial facilities from yeast could eliminate the need for the tightly controlled legal plant-production chain. Read the full story here.
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