Metab Eng: Treat Parkinson's with tomatoes? British scientists have developed an improved version of tomatoes that could be a source of drugs for Parkinson's disease

For people who lose weight or work out, no matter how demanding your recipe design is, tomatoes are definitely your choice.
as a healthy food, tomatoes are rich in vitamin A, vitamin C, as well as carotene and calcium, iron, zinc, and other elements, to reduce cholesterol levels, prevention of hyperlipidemia is very beneficial.
but can you imagine tomatoes one day being used to treat Parkinson's disease? Cathie Martin, a professor in the Department of Metabolic Biology and Biochemistry at Norwich Research Park in the UK, and her co-partners recently developed a genetically modified tomato that could provide a drug for Parkinson's disease.
work was published in metabolic engineering under the title "Metabolic engineering of tomato fruit enriched in L-DOPA".
the plight of Parkinson's disease treatment is not fully statistical, as of 2015, about 6.2 million people worldwide suffer from Parkinson's disease, resulting in 117,000 deaths.
over 60 are a high-risk group for the disease, so Parkinson's disease is also known as the "killer of the elderly."
But unfortunately, Parkinson's disease is currently incurable, everyone is familiar with the boxing king Ali, once in the boxing arena, helpless to suffer from this disease, but also can only limb stiff, hands and feet trembling through the old years, people can not help but boo.
in current medical treatments, the main treatment is usually to improve symptoms, with L-DOPA used in the initial stages of the disease, in conjunction with dopamine agitants.
L-DOPA, also known as Levodopa or L-3,4 - hydroxyphenyl alanine, is a non-standard amino acid.
has been the gold standard for treating Parkinson's disease since it was introduced as a drug in 1967.
is also one of the essential medicines declared by the World Health Organization ( WHO ) , with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars .
Parkinson's disease is a growing problem in developing countries, and many people can't afford a synthetic L-DOPA price of $2 a day.
, especially the elderly, who are inseerable.
clearly, the findings of Cathie Martin and others are a life-saving straw for these troubled patients.
researchers say we can grow the tomatoes with relatively little infrastructure and expand them at a relatively low cost.
, the genetically modified tomato will make the expensive drug affordable in developing countries.
, drugs are synthesized in chemically as well as natural sources.
Kathie Martin's team chose to use a tomato source that produces L-DOPA, and it is expected to eliminate the adverse effects of nausea and vomiting from the chemical synthesis of L-DOPA.
may ask that only a few plants in natural sources can be genetically synthesized.
why are tomatoes selected in these limited plants? Why tomatoes? Of the limited plant sources that can accumulate L-DOPA, the most studied are not tomatoes but burrbeans, whose seeds contain up to 10% L-DOPA.
But this source plant is far from ideal, and the burrbean cover bean burr can cause irritation and allergic reactions among field workers who harvest crops, and the beans themselves contain high levels of tryptamine, which can cause hallucinations in people with Parkinson's disease.
to explore the possibility of increasing the accumulation of L-DOPA plant varieties, researchers introduced an enzyme in the betalains biosynthetic pathway that converts tyrosine into L-DOPA, resulting in L-DOPA-rich tomato fruits.
analysis of L-DOPA levels in tomato fruits shows that 150 mg of L-DOPA can be produced from approximately 1 kg of this modified version of tomatoes.
, the researchers compared the results and found that increasing L-DOPA levels in tomatoes also extended shelf life.
associated with improved antioxidant capacity, reduced cell wall degradation, increased post-harvest hardness, and reduced susceptibleness to disease after genetic expression.
, one of the authors of the study, said: "We have demonstrated that genetically modified tomatoes can be used as a source of L-DOPA.
this further proves that tomatoes are one of the best choices in synthetic biology.
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