What mushrooms can be used as medicine?

Natural Daily-According to plant pathologists, mushrooms can be used as biochemical factories to produce various drugs useful to human beings. "Some people think that the potential value of mushrooms is an alternative platform for producing a large number of commercially valuable protein," said Charles Peter Peter Roman, a professor of mycelium nature and plant pathology at Pennsylvania State University. Mushrooms may become an ideal carrier for biopharmaceutical products to treat a series of diseases. But no one has come up with a feasible method yet. Professor Romaine and his colleagues genetically modified mushroom spores-this is the key to the diversity of mushrooms, which are also the main food species in the world. One of the technologies they use is to use transgenic mushrooms as factories to produce therapeutic protein, such as vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and hormones such as insulin, or commercial enzymes, such as cellulase as biofuel. "At present, medical treatment can only treat 500 left-handed diseases and genetic diseases, but due to human genome engineering, new drugs will be effective for thousands of other diseases in the near future," said Professor Romaine. "We need a new method to produce protein-based drugs on a large scale, which is economical, safe and fast. We believe that mushrooms will become such a platform in the future. "

In order to create transgenic mushrooms, researchers need to insert a hygromycin (an antibiotic) resistant gene fragment into the circular fragment (also known as plasmid) of bacterial DNA, which will be replicated in large quantities with the replication of Agrobacterium. Hygromycin gene is a marker that can screen transformed and untransformed mushroom cells. Professor Romaine explained, "What we do is to get such a gene, for example, it is a drug gene, which is not part of the mushroom gene itself, and it needs to be adjusted as a mushroom gene. We can modify these gene units in the plasmid and then insert them back into the chromosome of the bacteria, "he added. Then, the researchers cut a small part from the mushroom tissue and added it to the body containing the altered bacteria. A few days later, when the bacterium goes through its life cycle, it will transform some plasmids in its cells into mushroom cells, and then integrate this new gene fragment into the chromosome of mushroom. Next, the researchers used these mushroom cells to contact hygromycin. These antibiotics can kill all normal cells and isolate which cells can resist hygromycin. This experiment proves that if another gene, such as insulin, is integrated into the plasmid, this gene can be well expressed. "This is a great probability. If this mushroom cell has hygromycin resistance gene, it will also have the same gene, "Dr. Romaine added."

Among all the complicated factors, the degree of gene expression ultimately depends on the position of the inserted gene in the mushroom chromosome, but the researchers pointed out that unlike the long growth cycle of plants, the production process of mushroom biopharmaceuticals may be faster and cheaper than the conventional production process. Through these mushrooms, we can use commercial technology to transform vegetable tissues into vegetable seeds. Dr. Romaine said that the mushroom-based biochemical factory can eliminate the expensive infrastructure established by most pharmaceutical companies. The patent right of this technology belongs to Payne company, and Agariger company has a special license to develop this technology, and Dr. Romaine is one of the partners of this company.