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Researchers have developed a transgenic rice strain which lowers blood pressure in laboratory rats. Genes from unrelated organisms were artificially introduced into the rice to cause production of ten different blood pressure affecting peptides.
In the future, taking your blood pressure medication could be as simple as eating a spoonful of rice. This "treatment" could also have fewer side effects than current blood pressure medicines. As a first step, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have made transgenic rice that contains several anti-hypertensive peptides. When given to hypertensive rats, the rice lowered their blood pressure.
The rice contains natural ACE inhibitors which help to regulate blood pressure and don't have the side effects often associated with pharmaceutical ACE inhibitors such as "dry cough, headache, skin rashes and kidney impairment."
Two hours after treatment, hypertensive rats showed a reduction in blood pressure, while rats treated with wild-type rice proteins did not. Treatment of rats over a 5-week period with flour from the transgenic rice also reduced blood pressure, and this effect remained 1 week later. The treated rats had no obvious side effects in terms of growth, development or blood biochemistry.
In the United States, Hypertension affects almost half of the adult population and is a primary or contributing cause of death for about half a million people per year.
Journal Reference:
Hypotensive Activity of Transgenic Rice Seed Accumulating Multiple Antihypertensive Peptides, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.0c01958)
(Score: 3, Touché) by hubie on Sunday June 28 2020, @05:24PM (3 children)
n/t
(Score: 2) by hubie on Sunday June 28 2020, @05:26PM
(Sorry, after couldn't help making a little joke there; I just got through all the comments of one of our more politically charged stories)
:)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bot on Sunday June 28 2020, @08:23PM (1 child)
If normal food were just as able to reduce pressure, nobody would talk about it.
Oh wait, BTW my mother were prescribed the pill to treat (not cure) hypertension, drastically changed diet and did without the pill. Try eating less sugar, less salt, no MSG, no preservatives, more veggies, fish proteins twice a week, meat twice a month, some fat, sleep more, live in a less noisy place, and see how the pressure goes.
Also, transgenic : food = proprietary : software.
If you mandate that transgenic must not be sterile and must be reproducible by anyone without patents, then I will consider it.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2020, @09:46PM
Only, literally only, in your reaction to and treatment of it.
Oh. My. Goodness. Please never make policy. Horizontal gene transfer is MUCH less common than lineage and hybridization. Genes also, less commonly, move around WITHIN an organism's genome - though "when" varies and the most important time is meiosis. Transgenics that are not sterile are dangerous in the same way that cane toads in AU were dangerous; we cannot predict the future, so we cannot know the risk to novel introductions.
So please make note - what you want is NOT "not sterile"! What you want is propagateable. This is already how humans spread apples, grapes, roses, etc. Graft the "clone" (from the plant you want) onto a hardy rootstock that's wild-type.
Now, having said that, personally I want transgenic apples etc. to fuck right off, whether or not I can graft them and get produce from my orchard. Mucking with these is like the Curies working with Curium. We might get interesting scientific data, but it's also likely to be dangerous at times, until we have the knowledge and tools to deal with it properly.