Science News article about corn collagen replacing gelatin

[Guest guest]

This article was in the September 1st issue (Vol. 172, No. 9, p. 142), and is

only available online to rs -- and, it's short -- so I've reproduced it

here.

 

There is the GMO element to this scientific breakthrough, which they don't

address. Still, a good example of how we can get past the use of animal products

in areas other than food.

 

Liz

____________

Corny collagen

 

 

Brian Vastag

 

 

From Boston, at a meeting of the American Chemical Society

 

Slaughterhouse leftovers such as skin, tendons, bone, and

cartilage are often processed into gelatin that's used in many

products, including pill coatings and capsules. The primary protein in

gelatin, collagen, can now be extracted from an engineered strain of

corn, researchers report, suggesting that the pharmaceutical industry

could go vegetarian.

 

In 2004, scientists at the company FibroGen in South San

Francisco, Calif., spliced a collagen gene into corn and grew a small

plot of the transgenic crop in Nebraska. But it took until now to

develop a four-step procedure to recover and purify the small amounts

of collagen in the corn, reports Iowa State University's Cheng Zhang,

part of the team that collaborated with FibroGen to develop the

process.

 

Unlike its animal–by-product cousin, the corn-derived collagen

purified at Iowa State in Ames is uniform in composition and should be

easier for drugmakers to work with, says FibroGen's Julio Baez. It also

eliminates the danger of transferring animal viruses to people via the

slaughterhouse product.

 

" Right now there are 1,000 cows in every cold capsule, " Baez

quips. After collagen extraction, corn waste could serve as a raw

material for making ethanol or other products, he says (SN: 8/25/07, p. 120).

 

His team is now trying to boost the yield of corny collagen. The

test crop generated just 3 milligrams of collagen per kilogram of

kernels.