Maximize the method of plant extracts
As early as the 1980s, it was discovered that when plants were infected by bacteria, viruses or fungi, salicylic acid would be produced in the injured parts. Salicylic acid circulates in the plant and stimulates the plant to produce protective substances. Now, scientists have used different stimuli to conduct experiments on 1600 plants respectively, proving that each plant produces a series of different substances. Fortunately, 24 compounds with possible anti-tumor effects and 20 compounds with anti-microbial effects have been found. One of these compounds kills Staphylococcus (one of the common bacteria that cause pneumonia and sepsis).
American scientist Ruskin et al. invented a simple method for extracting plant ingredients without using organic solutions. Its special feature is: using plants to secrete or artificially stimulate it to produce certain medicinal ingredients, and effectively extract them. This method, which can synthesize corresponding drugs according to people's needs, saves time and effort, and has high output and guaranteed output.
Scientists noticed that plants use their huge roots to extract nutrients and fix themselves in the soil. The roots of one hectare of rye add up to 140 million kilometers long, which is longer than the distance from the earth to the sun. Moreover, the roots of plants are not protected by thorns or waxy membranes like the above-ground parts of plants, and they are susceptible to damage by microorganisms and insects.
Therefore, the roots of plants can only rely on the production of some chemicals to resist external damage. A few years ago, Ruskin and others began to study how to use plant roots to absorb harmful chemicals to purify the soil. Later, he turned to research how to use plant roots to produce and control useful substances. Their research idea is to use fungi or bacteria to stimulate the roots of plants to induce the plants to secrete some chemical substances to kill these microorganisms. The experimental results confirm that this scheme is feasible.
Later, they realized that they could use soilless cultivation techniques to cultivate plants in nutrient-containing water, so that the chemicals synthesized by the roots would be secreted into the water. Extracting these medicinal substances from water is easier than extracting them from organic solvents. Much.
The advantage of this extraction method is that because the roots of the plant produce only a few hundred compounds, it is much simpler to operate than the thousands of substances produced by the entire plant. Scientists have been considering and implementing the use of genetically modified plants to produce proteins needed by humans, and these proteins will have a wide range of applications in medicine.
Nowadays, genetic engineering technology is usually used to use bacteria or animal cells to produce protein, but the production process of protein is very complicated. After production, it must be modified by sugar and lipids to be active. This kind of protein synthesized by bacteria or animal cells is often less active, and what's worse is that these heterologous proteins can cause an immune response when entering the human body.
The proteins synthesized by plants are very similar to those of the human body. Purifying these proteins will also be a very simple process. Researchers have done experiments: separately human placental enzyme gene, a bacterial enzyme gene and jellyfish fluorescent protein gene and the signal peptide encoding the endoplasmic reticulum After the plasma reticulum is processed, it can be secreted) DNA sequences are connected and transferred into tobacco.
It was found that 80% of the products of these three genes were secreted into the culture medium through the roots of tobacco. If this synthetic protein can be continuously extracted from the culture medium in the future, its economic benefits will be very considerable.
The current research focus of Ruskin and his colleagues is to find antibiotics and anti-tumor drugs, and they hope that in the future they will be able to obtain drugs for the treatment of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Although the current method for extracting botanicals needs to be perfected, the extracted compounds need to be verified in detail before they can be used in clinical practice. However, some experts believe that this is a new idea of using plants to develop new drugs, and it may open a new page in pharmacology.
