Category: Plants & Medicine

In southern Italy, Quave discovered that healers use elmleaf blackberry to treat boils and abscesses. She gathered a few bags of blackberry roots, sliced and dried the samples, vacuum-sealed them in plastic bags and shipped them back to her lab in Atlanta, where her colleagues ground them to a powder in a mill and extracted organic molecules using various solvents. When they added different combinations of blackberry molecules to brothy wells of MRSA — a particularly antibiotic-resistant species of Staphylococcus bacteria — the botanical extracts did not kill the microbes as typical antibiotics do. Rather, they prevented the bacteria from forming slimy, intractable mats called biofilms, which allow them to adhere to living tissues and medical devices like catheters in hospitals. (Click on title for full story.)

What particularly got Buenz’s scientific senses tingling in the bush was not the sting from the poisonous spines of the ongaonga but the numbing aftermath. It’s not common to get such an effect on the nervous system from a substance that is only applied to the skin. (Click on title for full story.)

In a few years’ time, people with celiac disease could take a pill containing these enzymes, which would allow them to fully break down gluten. (Click on title for full story.)

Biomaterials engineers, who create stand-ins for our own body tissues, historically focus on animal species, like pigs, with organs similar to ours. Until now, the plant kingdom has been largely neglected, but it offers a vast variety of architectures, many of which can serve the needs of human physiology. It also offers an escape route from expensive, proprietary biomaterials: an open-source approach. (Click on titl for full story.)

Collaborating with researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Penn team developed an oral vaccine booster by manipulating plants to express a protein found in the polio virus. Tests with sera from immunized mice show that the booster confers immunity against all three serotypes of polio. (Click on title for full story.)

Bio-pharming uses genetic modification to introduce genes coding for pharmaceutical proteins (e.g. antibodies, or when produced in plants; ‘plantibodies’) into plants, the plant will then produce these proteins as if they were its own – essentially acting as a protein factory. The plants are harvested, the pharma-protein extracted and purified to a level comparable to any other medicinal protein. (Click on title for full story.)

It has long been called the “King of Flowers” in China but now the tree peony could rule the waves as an alternative to fish oil. The native Chinese plant has seeds that can be squeezed to make the healthiest kind of cooking oil, according to a new study by Chinese scientists. (Click on title for full story.)

Since the commencement of this project, we have been able to successfully assess the effect of a simple water extract of dandelion root in various human cancer cell types, in the lab and we have observed its effectiveness against human T cell leukemia, chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, pancreatic and colon cancers, with no toxicity to non-cancer cells. Furthermore, these efficacy studies have been confirmed in animal models (mice) that have been transplanted with human colon cancer cells. (Click on title for full article.)

As a group of compounds, the flavones are relatively well understood. But the beneficial flavones found in Huang-Qin roots, such as wogonin and baicalin, are different: a missing -OH (hydroxyl) group in their chemical structure left scientists scratching their heads as to how they were made in the plant. (Click on title for full story.)