Home-brewed morphine now possible

Scientists have discovered a way of brewing morphine using the same equipment as a home brew beer kit by genetically modifying yeast to convert sugar to morphine.

Up until now, morphine has only been able to be produced from harvesting poppies. However this latest research, published in Nature Chemical Biology, brewing the drug could make producing the drug easier.

By using DNA from plants to genetically engineer yeasts capable of converting sugar into morphine, scientists at the University of Berkeley claim it is now possible to “brew” morphine.

As reported by the BBC, Dr John Dueber, a bioengineer at the university, said: “What you really want to do from a fermentation perspective is to be able to feed the yeast glucose, which is a cheap sugar source, and have the yeast do all the chemical steps required downstream to make your target therapeutic drug.

“With our study, all the steps have been described, and it’s now a matter of linking them together and scaling up the process. It’s not a trivial challenge, but it’s doable.”

While the benefits to modern medicine could be huge, there are concerns that the newly discovered method could give rise to “home-brewed” illegal drugs.

“In principle, anyone with access to the yeast strain and basic skills in fermentation would be able to grow morphine producing yeast using a a home-brew kit for beer-making,” according to a report by the Nature Journal.

Experts have called for the introduction of laws to control to control organisms being genetically modified to produce narcotics.

The discovery was described as an “important time” by Professor Paul Freemont, one of the directors of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College London.

“Making opioids that can be used in an illegal sense makes this an important story. It’s technically demanding to make these strains, but in the future who is to know? That is why this is such an important time – how do we regulate these strains?”