• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Saturday, August 30, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News

Penn Dental team tweaks DNA to improve plant-based medicines

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
November 1, 2016
in Science News
Reading Time: 2 mins read
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

Henry Daniell, a professor in the departments of Biochemistry and Pathology in the University of Pennsylvania's School of Dental Medicine, has found great success in using genetic engineering to coax lettuce and tobacco plants to produce foreign proteins in their leaves, be they from a polio virus to make vaccines, a wormwood plant to synthesize malaria drugs, or the human clotting factor to make a hemophilia treatment.

Yet over the years, he noticed that while his plant-based drug production platform could efficiently express bacterial genes as well as short human genes, it had trouble expressing viral genes and longer human genes. One explanation for this, Daniell and colleagues hypothesized, could have to do with differences among plants, animals, bacteria, and viruses in how they use the DNA code to make proteins.

"Plant chloroplasts are bacteria-like, or prokaryotic, and humans are eukaryotic," says Daniell. "So that's the challenge: How can we make a chloroplast recognize a human gene and transform it like its own to make a protein?"

Proteins are made up of building blocks called amino acids, which are themselves produced according to three-letter strings of DNA called codons. There are 64 codons but only 20 amino acids, because multiple codons encode the same amino acid. But it turns out that different organisms have different preferences for which codon they use to produce a given amino acid.

It was these species-specific preferences that Daniell's team sought to exploit in a recent paper published in the journal Plant Physiology. The researchers analyzed the genomes of 133 plant species to see which codons were used most frequently to code for particular amino acids. Using their results from this analysis, they designed a software program that converts any given DNA sequence into the sequence that would be preferred by either lettuce or tobacco plants. This software is now freely available for other researchers to use.

Next the team tested whether this process of "codon optimization" resulted in increased levels of protein expression, using a head-to-head comparison of the optimized gene–the output from the software–versus the native gene in two different proteins, one used in a hemophilia therapy and one used in a polio vaccine.

Working with Novo Nordisk, the company that is funding Daniell's hemophilia research, the research team developed a technique involving a probe to the protein of interest to arrive at an exact quantity in the finished batches.

The findings revealed the significant impact of codon optimization: The process led to expression levels of hemophilia clotting factor five to six times higher than the native protein, and to levels of the poliovirus protein roughly 26 times higher than the native sequence.

"These two advances–improving the expression levels of protein and quantifying an exact dose–were key questions the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] has had about our work," Daniell says. "Now that we've addressed these issues, we're closer than ever to getting these therapies to the clinic."

###

Media Contact

Katherine Unger Baillie
[email protected]
215-898-9194
@Penn

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews

Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

Graded Nursing Interventions Reduce Stress in Liver Cancer Patients

August 30, 2025

Decoding Neuromodulation Biomarkers for Mental Health

August 30, 2025

Impact of Environment on Hornbill Behavior in Zoos

August 30, 2025

Predicting Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Response with PET/CT

August 30, 2025
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • blank

    Breakthrough in Computer Hardware Advances Solves Complex Optimization Challenges

    151 shares
    Share 60 Tweet 38
  • Molecules in Focus: Capturing the Timeless Dance of Particles

    142 shares
    Share 57 Tweet 36
  • New Drug Formulation Transforms Intravenous Treatments into Rapid Injections

    116 shares
    Share 46 Tweet 29
  • Neuropsychiatric Risks Linked to COVID-19 Revealed

    82 shares
    Share 33 Tweet 21

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Graded Nursing Interventions Reduce Stress in Liver Cancer Patients

Decoding Neuromodulation Biomarkers for Mental Health

Impact of Environment on Hornbill Behavior in Zoos

  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.