Researchers have reproduced the entire biochemical pathway for how coca plants make cocaine in another plant, which could help people manufacture the drug for scientific study
About 1/25th the concentration in coca plant. However:
“At present, the available production of cocaine in tobacco is not enough to meet the demand on a mass scale,” says Huang, but the constructed biosynthetic pathway could be assembled in organisms with large biomass and quick growth, such as the bacterium Escherichia coli or the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, he says.
I once studied how to make E. Coli turn waste sugars into plastic precursors. The conclusion of the research paper I read was that making plastic was economically nonviable, I believe, because the cost of the sugar was more than the amount of chemical you could get the bugs to produce. They did hundreds of different optimizations of the Krebs cycle and got it pretty good, but it still wasn't there.
E. Coli is a simple organism with strains made non-infectious that can accept plasmids. Plasmids are pieces of DNA that you can custom order with whatever genes you want. For example, there are radioactivity resistant Deinococcus radiodurans and radioactivity eating Geobacter sp. (though the mechanism of eating radioactive material appears to be elusive). If you wanted to do a bio-remediation project, you could Frankenstein an E. Coli with plasmids from those two and put them into Chernobyl to attempt to get rid of some of the radioactivity (and then proceed to infect a 100 square km radius of people living nearby with spontaneously transformed, reinfections E. Coli thereby making the problem worse).
Bioengineering is an interesting field. No doubt incredibly frustrating and fleeting in its efficacy without well established methods.
Check out the chart in this study titled "Downstream processing of recombinant human insulin and its analogues production from E. coli inclusion bodies" for a neat chart on how E. Coli with plasmids make insulin. I think this process happen(s/ed) at scale in giant vats. https://bioresourcesbioprocessing.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40643-021-00419-w
Edit: Holy shit I found the paper from the first paragraph titled "Metabolic engineering of Escherichia coli for direct production of 1,4-butanediol" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51156399_Metabolic_engineering_of_Escherichia_coli_for_direct_production_of_14-butanediol
There was another experiment a few years ago where scientists did exactly that but with opiates instead of coke. They spliced poppy genes into yeast that enabled opiate biosynthesis alongside the regular fermentation.
Unfortunately the yield is so extremely low that it is nowhere near practical. And if I remember correctly, it takes multiple fermentation steps chained together with different strains of engineered yeast to complete each step in the biosynthesis. But this stuff has the potential to end the war on drugs if the process could be simplified and made more efficient. At that point we'd just need the yeast to leak once and it'd be out into the world forever.
About 1/25th the concentration in coca plant. However:
Wait... so E.Coli could produce coke?
oh boy oh boy, eating undercooked food has never been funner.
I once studied how to make E. Coli turn waste sugars into plastic precursors. The conclusion of the research paper I read was that making plastic was economically nonviable, I believe, because the cost of the sugar was more than the amount of chemical you could get the bugs to produce. They did hundreds of different optimizations of the Krebs cycle and got it pretty good, but it still wasn't there.
E. Coli is a simple organism with strains made non-infectious that can accept plasmids. Plasmids are pieces of DNA that you can custom order with whatever genes you want. For example, there are radioactivity resistant Deinococcus radiodurans and radioactivity eating Geobacter sp. (though the mechanism of eating radioactive material appears to be elusive). If you wanted to do a bio-remediation project, you could Frankenstein an E. Coli with plasmids from those two and put them into Chernobyl to attempt to get rid of some of the radioactivity (and then proceed to infect a 100 square km radius of people living nearby with spontaneously transformed, reinfections E. Coli thereby making the problem worse).
Bioengineering is an interesting field. No doubt incredibly frustrating and fleeting in its efficacy without well established methods.
Check out the chart in this study titled "Downstream processing of recombinant human insulin and its analogues production from E. coli inclusion bodies" for a neat chart on how E. Coli with plasmids make insulin. I think this process happen(s/ed) at scale in giant vats. https://bioresourcesbioprocessing.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40643-021-00419-w
Edit: Holy shit I found the paper from the first paragraph titled "Metabolic engineering of Escherichia coli for direct production of 1,4-butanediol" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51156399_Metabolic_engineering_of_Escherichia_coli_for_direct_production_of_14-butanediol
So what they're saying is they could make a yeast strain that makes beer with coke in it?
There was another experiment a few years ago where scientists did exactly that but with opiates instead of coke. They spliced poppy genes into yeast that enabled opiate biosynthesis alongside the regular fermentation.
Unfortunately the yield is so extremely low that it is nowhere near practical. And if I remember correctly, it takes multiple fermentation steps chained together with different strains of engineered yeast to complete each step in the biosynthesis. But this stuff has the potential to end the war on drugs if the process could be simplified and made more efficient. At that point we'd just need the yeast to leak once and it'd be out into the world forever.
cocaine cordials were really popular in the 19th century, the Pope even gave an award to a guy making coke wine at some point
Organisms with larger biomass, you say? Shoot yourself up with crispr to implant the cocaine-production genes. What could go wrong.
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cocaine isn't even in my top 20 drugs I wish were legal
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Maybe it’s just me but I get a pretty decent bit of euphoria from it that lasts for a good bit even if the energy doesn’t last long
I’ve heard other people say the same thing you’re saying tho,
Tried it a few times, it's alright but I get the same energy from a round of shadowboxing
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Iirc there's like one plant in New Jersey that makes medical cocaine and it also creates Coca-cola extracts as well.