Filed in archive
Food and Agriculture
, Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics
by Gloria Gamat on July 9, 2008

© Manjith Kainickara
Korean research has come up with the potential of tomato as carrier of an edible vaccine against Alzheimer's disease.
Kim and colleagues' aim was to develop a plant-derived vaccine against Alzheimer's disease, since beta-amyloid is toxic to animal cells. Tomatoes are an attractive candidate as a vaccine carrier because they can be eaten without heat treatment, which reduces the risk of destroying the immune stimulation potential of the foreign protein. The researchers inserted the beta-amyloid gene into the tomato genome and measured the immune responses to the tomato-derived toxic protein in a group of 15-month-old mice.
They immunized the mice orally with the transgenic tomato plants once a week for three weeks, and also gave the mice a booster seven weeks after the first tomato feed. Blood analyses showed a strong immune response after the booster, with the production of antibodies to the human foreign protein.
Still on initial stages, but interestingly promising line of research. We definitely would like to know how this one goes.
Tags:
betaamyloid
gene
betaamyloid
transgenic
tomatoes
edible
carrier
Alzheimers
disease
vaccine
tomato
al
Trackback: http://publish.creative-weblogging.com/publish/mt-tb.pl/128412
Mr Wong
Vote for Tomato: Potential Carrier of Alzheimer's Vaccine?:
|
Rating: 8.67 out of 3 vote(s) cast.
|
Subscribe
Use the search to look for other interesting posts
| RSS | See all blog subscribe options |
|
What is RSS? | |
| Yahoo! |
|
| Addthis |
|
| Bloglines |
|
| Newsletter | |
| Follow us on Twitter! |







