Maximize the methods of plant extracts

Maximize the methods of plant extracts
As early as the 1980s, it was discovered that when plants were infected by bacteria, viruses, or fungi, they would produce salicylic acid at the injured site. Salicylic acid then circulates in the plant, stimulating the production of protective substances in the plant. Now, scientists have experimented with different stimuli in 1600 plants, demonstrating that each plant produces a different set of substances. Fortunately, 24 compounds that may have antitumor effects and 20 compounds that have antimicrobial effects have been found. One of these compounds can kill Staphylococcus, one of the common bacteria that cause pneumonia and sepsis.
American scientist Ruskin et al. invented a simple method for extracting plant ingredients without using organic solutions. Its unique feature is that it uses plants to secrete or artificially stimulate them to produce certain medicinal components and effectively extract them. This method of synthesizing corresponding drugs according to people's needs saves time and effort, and has a high yield and guaranteed output.
Scientists have noticed; Plants use their huge roots to absorb nutrients and fix themselves in the soil. The roots of a hectare of rye add up to 140 million kilometers long, which is longer than the distance from the earth to the sun. Moreover, unlike the aboveground parts of plants, which are protected by thorns or waxy membranes, the roots of plants are easily attacked by microorganisms and insects.
Therefore, the roots of plants can only produce some chemicals to resist external damage. A few years ago, Ruskin et al. began studying how to use plant roots to absorb harmful chemicals to purify the soil. Later, it turned to studying how to use plant roots to produce and control useful substances. Their research idea is to stimulate the roots of plants with fungi or bacteria, prompting plants to secrete some chemicals to kill these microorganisms. The experimental results confirm that this scheme is feasible.
After that, they realized that soilless cultivation techniques could be used to cultivate plants in water containing nutrients, so that the chemicals synthesized by the roots would be secreted into the water. Extracting these substances with medicinal value from the water was much simpler than extracting them from organic solvents.
The advantage of this extraction method is that because the roots of plants produce only a few hundred compounds, it is much simpler to operate compared to the thousands of substances produced by the entire plant. Scientists have been considering and implementing the use of genetically modified plants to produce proteins needed by humans, which will have wide applications in medicine.
Currently, genetic engineering techniques are commonly used to generate proteins from bacterial or animal cells, but the process of protein production is very complex, and after production, proteins need to be modified by sugars and lipids to become active. "This protein synthesized by bacteria or animal cells often has little activity, and even worse, the introduction of these heterologous proteins into the body can also trigger an immune response.".
However, proteins synthesized from plants are very similar to human proteins, and purification of these proteins will also be a very simple process. Researchers have conducted experiments by connecting the human placental enzyme gene, a bacterial enzyme gene, and a jellyfish fluorescent protein gene with the DNA sequence of a signal peptide encoding the endoplasmic reticulum (a signal that secretes proteins into the endoplasmic reticulum, which can only be secreted after processing), and transferring them into tobacco.
The results showed that 80% of the products of these three genes were secreted into the culture medium through the roots of tobacco. If this synthetic protein can be continuously extracted from culture medium in the future, its economic benefits will be significant.
Now Raskin and his colleagues are focusing on finding antibiotics and anti-tumor drugs. They hope to get drugs for diabetes and cardiovascular diseases in the future. Although the current method for extracting plant drugs needs to be improved, the extracted compounds need to be verified in detail for clinical use. However, some experts believe that this is a new idea for developing new drugs using plants, which may open a new page in pharmacology