https://www.visiontimes.com/2021/09/21/ucr-engineers-m**a-v*****es-lettuce-spinach.htmllettuce field October 9, 2006 in Gonzales, California. Researchers at the University of California Riverside have been given a $500,000 grant by the National Science Foundation to genetically engineer spinach and lettuce to carry m**A-based C****-** v*****es. (Image: David Paul Morris/Getty Images)
Researchers at a U.S.-based university have received a federal grant to study whether they can genetically engineer plants to carry Messenger RNA (m**A) v*****es.
The University of California Riverside announced in a Sept. 16 article on their website a project to examine “whether they can turn edible plants like lettuce into m**A v*****e factories.” The endeavor has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and will be in collaboration with UC San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University.
The article says the experiment has three goals:
Implanting “DNA containing the m**A v*****es” into the “part of plant cells where it will replicate”;
Demonstrating the plants can carry enough m**A to be the same as an injection; and
Determining dosage.
The leader of the project, Riverside’s Juan Pablo Giraldo, said, “Ideally, a single plant would produce enough m**A to v******te a single person,” adding the experiment is being done on spinach and lettuce with both “long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens” and mass industrial production.
The article says that researchers intend to engineer the plants’ chloroplasts, tiny mechanisms analogous to solar panels, to “express genes that aren’t naturally part of the plant.”
Giraldo has achieved this result in previous studies “by sending foreign genetic material into plant cells inside a protective casing,” notes the article.
The process described is directly analogous to how the current generation of m**A v*****es work in the human body. While conventional v*****es utilize an inactivated version of the v***s one wishes to elicit an antibody response against, m**A v*****es deliver billions of m**A instructions into your cells, causing your cells to grow the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the v***s which causes C****av***s Disease 2019 (C****-**).
The spike protein is the iconic protrusions covering a c****a (crown) v***s, which the v***s uses as a key to access cells for infection and replication. The m**A approach causes the body to generate antibodies in response to the synthetically grown spike protein, rather than the full v***l structure.
In order to get the m**A instructions from the injection site and past the cellular membrane, the genetic material is encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles, a man-made fat.
A March of 2021 article from Chemical and Engineering News explains the encapsulation in detail, “m**A is incredibly delicate. Enzymes in the environment and in our bodies are quick to chop m**A into pieces, making lab experiments difficult and the delivery of m**A to our cells daunting. On top of that, m**A strands are large and negatively charged and can’t simply waltz across the protective lipid membranes of cells.”
“To protect the fragile molecule as it sneaks into cells, they turned to a delivery technology with origins older than the idea of m**A therapy itself: tiny balls of fat called lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs.”
The article continues, “LNPs used in the C****-** v*****es contain just four ingredients: ionizable lipids whose positive charges bind to the negatively charged backbone of m**A, pegylated lipids that help stabilize the particle, and phospholipids and cholesterol molecules that contribute to the particle’s structure.”
“Thousands of these four components encapsulate m**A, shield it from destructive enzymes, and shuttle it into cells, where the m**A is unloaded and used to make proteins.”
The article notes Giraldo is working on a second project, backed by a $1.6 million grant from the NSF, to use nanomaterials to inject nitrogen fertilizer directly into the chloroplasts of plants in an attempt to prevent farmers from having to add fertilizer to their soil.