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Home-Brewed Heroin

Addy

Rebuild With Biden!
Interesting read... it's now possible to cook up morphine apparently.


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Snip
To produce opiates, the poppy relies on a complicated fifteen-step metabolic pathway that first evolved in the plant’s wild ancestors and has been refined over centuries by drug-hungry gardeners. For a decade, laboratories around the world have been adapting poppy DNA for use in yeast, designing their own strains of the fungus with the ability to turn sugar, its preferred food, into the chemical precursors to morphine. (The painkiller itself, which poppy plants already supply cheaply and with great virtuosity, isn’t always the prize; one of its precursors, an alkaloid called (S)-reticuline, can produce about twenty-five hundred other compounds, some of which are thought to have anticancer, antispasmodic, or antibiotic effects.)
Last summer, the Stanford University scientist Christina Smolke caused a stir by announcing that she and her colleagues had created an engineered yeast that could perform the final few steps in the long process of making morphine. Today’s paper, a collaboration between two labs—one at Concordia University, in Quebec, led by Vincent Martin, and the other at the University of California, Berkeley, led by John Dueber—fills in some earlier steps. For the first time, a single yeast cell can cook up morphine from scratch.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/home-brewed-heroin?intcid=mod-latest
 
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