Tomatoes may help in Alzheimer's vaccine

Published: July 8, 2008 at 3:07 PM DAEJEON, South Korea, July 8 (UPI) -- Tomatoes are an attractive candidate as a plant-derived vaccine carrier against Alzheimer's disease, researchers in South Korea said. HyunSoon Kim of the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology in South Korea and colleagues from Digital Biotech Inc. and Wonkwang University said tomatoes can be eaten without heat treatment, which reduces the risk of destroying the immune stimulation potential of the foreign protein. The researchers inserted the beta-amyloid gene -- Alzheimer's disease is thought to be caused by beta-amyloid accumulation, a toxic insoluble fibrous protein in the brain -- into the tomato genome and measured the immune responses to the tomato-derived toxic protein in a group of 15-month-old mice. They immunized the mice... [read full story]