Scientists Grow High-Protein Lettuce Using Gene Gun Technology

Scientists have successfully engineered lettuce and tobacco plants to produce myoglobin — a key animal protein responsible for meat’s distinctive color, flavor, and nutritional properties — marking a potential breakthrough in sustainable food production. The research, led by Alexia Groff and published in “Frontiers in Plant Science,” a plant biotechnology researcher at Imperial College London, used a technique called biolistic transformation. Put simply: a “gene gun” was used to fire microscopic gold particles coated in pig DNA into the chloroplasts of lettuce and tobacco seedlings. The chloroplast — the part of the plant cell responsible for photosynthesis — was chosen deliberately, as it produces large amounts of protein and naturally generates heme, the iron-containing compound that myoglobin needs to function.The results were promising. Both plant species successfully incorporated the pig DNA into their chloroplast genomes and passed the transferred genes on to their offspring. Myoglobin yields came in at approximately 810 mg per kilogram of dry weight for lettuce and 800 mg per kilogram for tobacco — around 10 times less than beef, but potentially competitive at scale due to the efficiency advantages of plant cultivation.“Our study demonstrates, for the first time, that higher plants can stably produce myoglobin, one of the key proteins responsible for many of meat’s desirable properties,” Mr. Groff told ScienceAlert. “This is very relevant at a time when the demand for sustainable food production platforms is greater than ever.”One notable finding was how well the engineered plants held up. Despite myoglobin’s tendency to bind heme — a molecule central to many plant processes — the transformed plants showed no significant impairment of photosynthesis and remained healthy and fertile.“One of the biggest surprises was how well the plants tolerated myoglobin production,” Mr. Groff said. “Although myoglobin binds heme, an important molecule involved in many aspects of plant metabolism, the transformed plants remained healthy, fertile, and showed no significant impairment of photosynthesis.”There are still challenges to address. The research team found that only around 35 percent of the extracted myoglobin had heme fully bound — compared to 80 percent in lab-produced myoglobin — suggesting that heme availability within the plant is currently a limiting factor. “We found that the protein folds correctly, but heme incorporation is incomplete, giving us a clear direction for improving future generations of these plants,” Mr. Groff said.Despite these limitations, outside researchers see the work as a meaningful step forward. Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, director of ICL’s Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein, said in a statement: “This is an important advance on earlier plant and algal research. Demonstrating stable myoglobin production in plant chloroplasts, including in an edible crop, raises the possibility of using plants as scalable, low-input production platforms alongside microbial fermentation. In the longer term, this could diversify how and where these ingredients are produced.”If the technique is refined and scaled, plant-derived myoglobin could be extracted and used as an ingredient in plant-based meats — or consumed directly as part of the engineered lettuce itself. Further safety and sustainability studies will be needed before commercial applications are possible.

Scientists Grow High-Protein Lettuce Using Gene Gun Technology

Scientists Grow High-Protein Lettuce Using Gene Gun Technology

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