Don’t wanna take the jab? No worries, just eat futuristic Covid-19 vaccine lettuce
Insert Bill Gates FARMland
Can you grow COVID-19 vaccine-lettuce? UC Riverside scientists think so.
Prof. Giraldo “We are testing this approach with spinach and lettuce and have long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens. Farmers could grow entire fields.”
Injectable vaccines could be a thing of the past, with University of California Riverside (UCR) researchers investigating turning edible plants like lettuce into mRNA vaccine factories and make edible vaccines, which could have significant implications in combating COVID-19.
Backed by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the project works by showing how DNA with mRNA vaccines can be delivered into plant cells in a way that lets them replicate. If this works, it could mean that plants could produce as much mRNA as a traditional vaccine injection.
Ideally, a single plant would produce enough mRNA to vaccinate a single person,” UNCR's Department of Botany and Plant Science's Prof. Juan Pablo Giraldo said in a statement.
“We are testing this approach with spinach and lettuce and have long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens,” added Giraldo, who is leading the research and working in collaboration with researchers from UC San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University. “Farmers could also eventually grow entire fields of it.”
But how do mRNA vaccines replicate inside plants?
The key, it turns out, are chloroplasts. These small organelles exist exclusively in plant cells, and cannot be found in non-plant life forms, save for the amoeboid known as Paulinella chromatophora.
The amount of chloroplasts per cell varies heavily depending on the plant. Inside the cell, they behave dynamically and serve a wide variety of functions such as synthesizing fatty acids, amino acids and helping the plant's immune response.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/can-you-grow-covid-19-vaccine-lettuce-uc-riverside-scientists-think-so-679655