November 20th, 2007
Will mushrooms replace eggs in vaccine production?
You can’t make a vaccine today without breaking a few eggs. But what about that other ingredient in any good omelot, the mushroom?
Peter Romaine at Penn State says simple button mushrooms can replace eggs in the production of many vaccines, and can replace chemical processes in the creation of other medicines as well.
A Romaine spin-off in North Carolina called Agarigen has gotten a $2 million grant to prove the theory.
The idea is to implant a gene which induces the production of a needed chemical into a mushroom’s gills, kill all the mushrooms which lack the new chemical, then harvest the chemical after a few mushroom generations.
It’s the rapid reproduction cycle of the mushroom which gives the technique its potency.
Of course, since you have a guy named Romaine replacing eggs with mushrooms, you don’t really have an omelot at all.
You have salad.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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