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MANIPULATING GENES is also the strategy of Naprogenix, a Kentucky-based start-up company that grew out of research at the Kentucky Tobacco Research & Development Center (KTRDC), Lexington. The company believes that by probing useful genes in plant genomes, it can make plants express a host of natural products that have never been seen before. The usual practice of sampling plants and analyzing them reveals only the chemicals that are being expressed on a particular day and time, depending on the stresses--insects, weather, or disease--the plant is responding to, says H. Maelor Davies, director of KTRDC. "We now know that plants have many more natural products pathways, but they are expressed only under certain conditions. The hidden chemical diversity is apparent at the genome level, and we are now poised to reveal it." To uncover that hidden chemical diversity, Naprogenix randomly mutates large populations of plant cells and screens the resulting cultures for compounds of interest, says John Littleton, a professor of molecular and biomedical pharmacology at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and chief biomedical research officer of Naprogenix. "We then establish what the compounds are and what bit of genome has been activated to produce them," he adds |
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