www.checkbiotech.org ; www.raupp.info ; www.czu.cz

The nightmare scenario of terrorists adding lethal toxins to water supplies
could be countered by synthesising antidotes in genetically modified plants,
January 2006.

Christopher Hall and his colleagues at the University of Guelph in
Ontario, Canada, have equipped tobacco plants with an extra gene to make
antibody fragments against botulinum A, which is produced by Clostridium
botulinum bacteria and is one of the world's most potent toxins.

Just 1 to 2 hectares planted with the tobacco would yield enough antibody to
treat 1 million people, says Hall, whose team's results are published online
in Vaccine (DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2005.11.014).

But for an antidote to be truly effective, it would also have to neutralise
the six other botulinum toxins produced by C. botulinum.

Hall is confident this is feasible. Even if each antibody had to be produced
in different strains of tobacco, the farmland needed to produce large
antidote stockpiles would be small compared with traditional tobacco
production, for which there is already a shrinking market.

[www.newscientist.com]

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