Solution for artificial-blood production? It might be rice!

When one says rice, a plethora of visions comes to my mind... Varying from a chinese family having a meal made from rice, through growing rice at rice fields to me, sitting in a shopping center enjoying a chinese food, which of course, is served with rice.

However, some things about rice could be be more than surprising!
 
Chinese scientists came up recently with a suggestion, which could make a break-through in producing artificial blood, namely a part of the blood - protein called albumine. That is - extracting this human-blood protein from rice seeds!

Above, you can see the structure of albumine. As you can see, it is a very complicated structure and preparing it ''in vitro'' would be extremely difficult.

''When extracted from rice seeds, the protein is "physically and chemically equivalent to blood-derived human serum albumin (HSA)," said the research in the US-published Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more: http://www.myfoxaustin.com/dpps/health/scientists-use-rice-to-make-human-blood-protein-dpgonc-20111031-ch_15734053#ixzz1e3m6HkaX

Albumine is used to produce serums and medicaments. It is also used, for example, for treating severe burns, traumatic shocks and liver diseases ( liver itself produces about 12 grams of albumine per day)

When the rice-based protein was tested in rats with liver cirrhosis, it brought similar results as treated with human-blood albumine.

As the world demanded about 500 tonnes of albumine per year in the several past years, China itself has faced shortages on this protein. 

 

According to scientists, a genetically modified rice could produce a sufficient amount of this protein for a very reasonable price.(That is about 2,75 grams of albumine from 1 kilogram of rice)

 So far, the demand for albumine has been solved by blood donations. Yet the new way to produce this protein has to be tested on people and undercome further research before it would be placed on the market.

Hopefully, we could exploit this widest-grown food more than just to eat one day! :-)


Sources:
http://www.freefoto.com/images/09/33/09_33_5---Chinese-Food_web.jpg
http://www.cchonline.eu/img/didattica/albumina.jpg
http://media.novinky.cz/100/131006-top_foto1-o5v3t.jpg