A hair-raising discovery about 'hairy roots'

Scientists are hoping that hairy root cultures like this could eventually produce medicines. Photo credit: Stephen Ausmus, US Department of Agriculture.

Sci-fi movies and comic books are not the only place you can find “hair-raising” mutants with super-powers. With the help of some special bacteria, scientists are giving plants mutant roots with abilities that may one day make super-heros turn green with envy. These roots may become biofactories — natural factories that churn out fuels, food flavorings, and even medicine.

Scientists have known that those special bacteria can carry new genes into plants. It may be a gene that tells the plant to make a medicine, for instance. When the bacteria infect a plant’s roots, they deposit that gene inside. The infection makes the roots sprout fuzzy growths, called “hairy roots.” When scientists grow hairy roots in laboratory dishes, the roots make and release the medicine.

Hairy roots are a super way of changing plant roots into factories. However, scientists did not know whether hairy root cultures would continue growing and working properly for long periods of time.

Dr. Ka-Yiu San led a team of scientists who finally answered a big question about hairy roots. Will hairy roots keep working in just the right way for long periods of time" Four years ago, Dr. San began looking for the answer. Dr. San put a jellyfish gene into those special bacteria, and used the microbes to infect roots from a rose plant. Scientists knew that gene got in, because the roots turned hairy and began glowing like a jellyfish.

In a new study in the American Chemical Society’s Biotechnology Progress, a magazine for scientists, Dr. San reported that those roots are still glowing 4 years later. For Dr. San, that means hairy roots will work for long periods of time. Dr. San says this is a big step forward toward using hairy root “biofactories”— big containers of mutant plant roots — for making useful chemicals like medicines.

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*The research in this press release is from a copyrighted publication, and stories must credit the journal by name or the American Chemical Society.

News media may obtain a full text of this report (“Long-term Maintenance of a Transgenic Catharanthus roseus Hairy Root Line”) in ACS’ Biotechnology Progress, by contacting Michael Bernstein.