Jaclyn Brenning
Daily Egyptian
SIUC biotechnologist David Lightfoot is used to having drug squads fly over his fields.
But, despite law enforcements' suspicions, Lightfoot isn't growing
marijuana. He's growing genetically-modified tobacco, which could help
the environment and possibly cure diseases like epilepsy or the common
cold.
Lightfoot is the head of a research team analyzing the effects of adding a single bacterial gene called Gdh to tobacco plants.
Discoveries could be used for preventing diseases in humans and
animals, but it's going to be a while before researchers know whether
or not the drugs have therapeutic value.
"It originally started as a way to make plants more nitrogen
efficient," Lightfoot said. "If the rainfall isn't good, plants don't
use up much nitrogen. The leftovers go into the rivers."
The addition of Gdh allowed tobacco plants to take on more nitrogen.
Herbicides sprayed over plants killed not only weeds but also the
plants' natural enzyme, which absorbed the nitrogen. The gene Gdh acted
as a second enzyme to take on nitrogen.
"It was a novel way of doing things," said Scott Nolte, a SIUC graduate
student in plant biology who's been with the project for five years.
Ahmed Jawad is another graduate student working on his doctorate in the
Molecular Biology, Microbiology and Biochemistry Department at SIUC. He
has been part of the research team for several years.
"Adding the Gdh gene is like two hands doing the same thing whereas
previously you had only one," Jawad said. "There are results in better
plant growth. As nitrogen increases, the biomass increases and the size
of the leaf increases. The plant basically produces more."
While adding the gene to the plants increased their ability to take
nitrogen, it produced some unexpected results in other areas.
With one of the most powerful telescopes on the market, the research
team looked at tobacco. Of nearly 3,000 chemicals, 1,600 had never been
seen, and almost 2,400 varied from the original tobacco.
"There's a lot of new medicines out there to be discovered in places
where we think we've looked before," Lightfoot said. "Sixty percent of
the chemicals we found had never been named by science because nobody
knew they were there. Our chemistry sets were sort of exhausted. Now we
had the strongest telescope in the world, and nobody had looked at
tobacco with it before."
After seeing how the gene works, the team is now trying to understand why it works.
Understanding tobacco is a steppingstone to understanding more
important plants, but how this gene affects the plant must be analyzed
before the research can be used commercially. Lightfoot said it may be
three to five years before the research can be used by the Food and
Drug Administration for agriculture but more than a decade before any
therapeutic value can be determined.
"It's kind of a complicated picture. More experiments and analyses need
to be done to explain why these things are happening," Jawad said.
Adding a gene could change one chemical or hundreds. There has been
controversy over the use of genetically modified plants in the past.
"In the era of backlash of biotechnology, two questions were being
asked," Lightfoot said. "One, are transgenic crops safe? The argument
by environmentalists was that transgenic crops are potentially
dangerous because each gene is different and may have unintended
consequences investigators did not see. And two, are they all the same?"
Nonetheless, he said he has faced little opposition and many people were willing to sponsor the project.
"There's a lot of people to thank for this one," Lightfoot said.
The Herman Frasch Foundation gave the team its first grant of $45,000.
Illinois Corn Marketing Board, concerned about the amount of nitrogen
flowing into the Mississippi River, gave $60,000. The Illinois-Missouri
Biotechnology Alliance and the Illinois Council of Food also
contributed funding.
"It may take another 16 years to finish this," Lightfoot said. "We're
still at the beginning stage where we're saying, 'Wow! Look at that!'"
