GM Foods: Enhancing Nutrition, Vaccine Delivery, and Allergen Reduction
GM Foods: Improving Nutritional and Functional Aspects
Potential Applications of GM Foods
- Design of organisms with nutrient composition suitable as vehicles for vaccines
- Using improved organoleptic qualities
- Elimination of allergens
Improving Nutritional Content: Golden Rice
Genetically modified food with enhanced nutritional quality, aiming to overcome vitamin A deficiency.
Deficiency: Xerophthalmia, keratomalacia, total blindness.
Epidemiology: 250,000 children develop blindness; 124 million children are deficient in vitamin A. Proper nutrition could prevent the deaths of over a million of them.
Perspective: To evaluate nutritional bioavailability, conduct studies, unify cell lines producing provitamin A lines with high iron content, and transfer the b-carotene property to local plant varieties.
Objective: To alleviate micronutrient deficiencies in specific population groups.
Improving Nutritional Content: Grain Protein and Vegetables
70% dietary protein deficiency in cereals and vegetables. Cereals lack lysine; vegetables lack methionine and cysteine.
Improving Nutritional Content: Production of Human Milk Proteins in Plants
Expression of Lactoferrin, lysozyme, and α-1 antitrypsin in rice.
Stability against pH, heat treatment, and hydrolytic enzymes.
Advantages: Simulate beneficial effects of breastfeeding.
Usage: Supplementation of infant formula.
Food as Vehicles for Vaccines: Animals and Plants as Bioreactors
Production of industrial or pharmaceutical interest: Purified Edible Vaccines.
Advantages:
- Cheaper production
- Minimized contamination with pathogens
- Mucosal immunity
- Protection from digestion
Food as Vehicles for Vaccines: Achievements
Spinach or other examples that express the virus capsid-modified alfalfa epitopes, potatoes expressing rabies antigens, derived from hepatitis B virus particles, and potatoes expressing Norwalk virus.
Plant trials provide enough recombinant protein, are not resistant to digestion aids, and need no side effects.
Improved Organoleptic Qualities
Traditional sweetener taste modifiers: sucrose alternatives.
Seeking low-calorie and ‘natural’ sweetener alternatives. Sweeter than sucrose with a negligible effect on calories, does not cause caries, and has no effect on carbohydrate metabolism.
Better Living Color
Color is a symbol of quality and fresh product without additives or coloring.
Preference to inhibit discoloration or oxidation: MRNA antisense polyphenol oxidase.
First results: potatoes.
Elimination of Allergens
Allergen potential risk assessment for nonzero product safety.
Elimination of allergens through co-suppression gene antisense mRNA.
Allergens: rice amylase inhibitors in human saliva, PM 14-16,000. Expression clones identified 10 antisense sequences of a single 300 mg / grain.
Current Limitations:
- Long-term instability of the gene deletion
- Multiple allergens without sequence homology
- Incomplete suppression of allergen gene expression contributes to the functionality of the plant
Alternative: Design of proteins homologous with non-allergenic and allergenic epitopes. Example: apple and cherry.