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'Home-brew' morphine from brewer's yeast now possible

Submitted by Marijuana News on Wed, 05/20/2015 - 08:00

Home-brewing could soon take on a more dangerous twist: Scientists have engineered brewer's yeast to synthesize opioids such as codeine and morphine from a common sugar, an international team reported on Monday.

"It is going to be possible to 'home-brew' opiates in the near future," Christopher Voight of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research, told reporters.

The process described in Nature Chemical Biology is inefficient, requiring 300 liters of genetically engineered yeast to produce a single 30 milligram dose of morphine.

But with improvements that are well within reach, that dose could be obtained from "a glass of yeast culture grown with sugar on a windowsill," Voight said.

For centuries, morphine and other opioids have been the go-to drugs for pain relief. But their molecular structure is so complex, they are isolated or manufactured from compounds in plants, such as opium poppies. Chemists have...

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URL: 
http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/05/18/science-opioids-yeast-idINKBN0O31VX20150518

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