Recently, researchers from the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences have proposed a new method for obtaining artemisinin. They transplanted the wormwood gene into chrysanthemum, and then extracted the natural antibiotic, artemisinin, which plays an important role in the treatment of malaria, and successfully developed Russia's first domestic anti-malarial drug. Related research results were published in the recent "Plant".
Due to population migration, the Moscow region and the Caucasus region have recently continued to record malaria focal points. Scientists say that climate warming will increase mosquito infectious diseases, which will accelerate the spread of malaria in Russia. But Russia has never produced artemisinin and any other anti-malarial drugs. The treatment can only use foreign drugs, and it is only extracted from wild plants, and there is no large-scale production.
Sergey Dolgov, Ph.D., the head of the Plant Genome Expression System and Transformation Laboratory at the Institute, said that most modern medicines contain active media, either by themselves or isolated from plants. Wormwood extract is indeed effective, but annual wormwood usually grows in rocky or grassland areas, and produces little in other climatic conditions. In order to meet the raw materials required for large-scale production of medicines, attention must be paid to modern molecular biology methods. The core idea of the researchers is to transfer the artemisinin metabolic pathway genes of wormwood to another host plant.
The study found that extracting artemisinin from chrysanthemum is a good method. Chrysanthemum contains a high natural terpenoid compound and a natural biologically active compound with a wide range of medicinal value. The wormwood gene is transplanted into the chrysanthemum. With the help of gene transplantation, artemisinin is produced in the chloroplast and then covers the entire leaf. Generally, artemisinin is only produced in the trichomes of wormwood, that is, wormwood epidermal hair cells, so the yield is very low.
Studies have shown that this method can greatly increase artemisinin production. The medicinal artemisinin content in wormwood is on average no more than 1% of the dry weight of the leaves, which cannot satisfy large-scale clinical production.
The laboratory of the collaborating researcher, Professor Alexander Weinstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, has identified four genes: ADS, CYP71AV1, DBR2 and CPR. These genes all encode enzymes for the artemisinin anabolic pathway. After transplanting them into a new environment and adding other genes, it is expected that artemisinin production will reach commercially viable levels.
It is reported that the first successfully transgenic chrysanthemum has been planted in the greenhouse for the next scientific research. The existence of artemisinin was confirmed by high performance liquid chromatography and thin layer chromatography.
