Anannya Roy, Amity University Kolkata
Lots of living organisms are used in Biotechnology as protein production hosts. They are extremely useful in drug development, biopharmaceuticals, and protein delivery. In this new research, earthworms are developed as next-generation animal protein production hosts, something that has never been done before.
Escherichia coli, our favorite bacteria has been used as a protein-producing model organism by researchers for a long time. But being a prokaryotic organism, it has certain drawbacks. Unlike eukaryotes, it does not undergo post-translational modifications. This is the major reason why so many eukaryotic heterologous gene expression hosts have been developed. This includes yeast and other fungi, insects, and even plants and animals.
The earthworms Eisenia fetida Waki and Eisenia andrei Sagami have been approved as model animals for acute toxicity tests by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and they even have post-translational modification systems. The transfection techniques employed were microinjection and electroporation systems. The maximum survival rates and transfection efficiencies were 79.2% and 29.2% for E. fetida and 95.8% and 50.0% for E. andrei. The human erythropoietin (hEPO) was detected in earthworm tail fragments using ELISA.
The development of this kind of transgenic animal system faces lots of ethical issues but since they can be reared at low cost and feed upon waste materials, there are not many restrictions in this case.
The results of this experiment have contributed a lot to the development of a novel heterologous gene expression system for producing biopharmaceuticals. A lot of work can be done in this field.
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