It’s crucial to incorporate vegetables into your diet, but many vital vitamins and nutrients, including certain amino acids and peptides, are only present in animal sources. In a groundbreaking study published in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, researchers outlined a new approach to generate creatine, carnosine, and taurine—key nutrients found in animals and frequently used in workout supplements—within a plant. This innovative system enables the easy combination of various synthetic modules to enhance production efficiency.
It’s crucial to incorporate vegetables into your diet, but many vital vitamins and nutrients, including specific amino acids and peptides, are only present in animal sources. In a groundbreaking study published in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, researchers outlined a new approach to generate creatine, carnosine, and taurine—key nutrients found in animals and frequently used in workout supplements—within a plant. This innovative system enables the convenient stacking of various synthetic modules to improve production efficiency.
Plants can adapt surprisingly well when prompted to produce unfamiliar compounds. Utilizing a specialized bacterium, scientists have been successful in transferring DNA instructions for various amino acids, peptides, proteins, and other molecules into the cells of different plants. For instance, this technology helped create lettuce with peptide components that diminished bone loss. However, when dealing with more intricate compounds, the transferred DNA instructions could alter the host plant’s natural metabolism, ultimately decreasing the production of the desired product. Pengxiang Fan and his colleagues aimed to tackle this challenge by incorporating instructions in the form of synthetic modules that encoded not only the target product but also the necessary building blocks for its synthesis. They set out to enhance the yield of three sought-after nutrients: creatine, carnosine, and taurine.
The team evaluated the interchangeable synthetic modules in Nicotiana benthamiana, a tobacco-like plant utilized as a model organism in synthetic biology:
- The creatine module, which contained the two genes responsible for creatine synthesis, yielded 2.3 micrograms of the peptide per gram of plant material.
- The carnosine peptide was produced using one module for carnosine and another for one of the necessary amino acids, β-alanine. Although β-alanine is naturally found in N. benthamiana, its quantities are minimal, so combining the modules increased carnosine production by a remarkable 3.8 times.
- Interestingly, the attempt to create taurine using a double-module strategy was unsuccessful. Instead, a significant disruption to the plant’s metabolism occurred, resulting in minimal taurine production as the plant struggled to restore balance.
In summary, this research illustrates a promising method for generating complex nutrients typically sourced from animals in a living plant system. The researchers suggest that future studies could extend this technique to edible plants, including fruits and vegetables, rather than solely leafy varieties, or other plants that can serve as bio-factories for sustainable nutrient production.
The authors express gratitude for the support received from the National Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province and the Starry Night Science Fund of Zhejiang University Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study.
