Chemists at MIT have hacked a periwinkle plant to produce anti-cancer and hypertension-fighting drugs. The chemical engineers modified the plant’s existing chemical assembly line, tweaking genes to create chemical components of the medicines. The researchers engineered mutant forms of a gene and inserted them into plant cell cultures, causing the plant to produce chemical compounds it would never produce in nature.

Plants are essentially chemical factories, capable of fusing molecules to form virtually any compound. With enough tweaking, we could coax them to build everything from medicines to fuels to super-strong building materials to revolutionary soda pop. If we can control how plants grow, we can do almost anything.

Link to MIT story