“Human gelatine genes”, a phrase that has never managed to intrigue the general public (or anyone else), might now have its day in the sun. The phrase appears in a July 13, 2011 press release from the American Chemical Society. That press release also features today’s Headline of the Day:
New method for making human-based gelatin
Scientists are reporting development of a new approach for producing large quantities of human-derived gelatin that could become a substitute for some of the 300,000 tons of animal-based gelatin produced annually for gelatin-type desserts, marshmallows, candy and innumerable other products. Their study appears in ACS’s Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry.… [The] scientists developed and demonstrated a method where human gelatin genes [emphasis added] are inserted into a strain of yeast, which can produce gelatin with controllable features. The researchers are still testing the human-yeast gelatin to see how well it compares to other gelatins in terms of its viscosity and other attributes. [Jinchun] Chen and colleagues suggest that their method could be scaled up to produce large amounts of gelatin for commercial use.
(HT Karen Weintraub)
BONUS: The study “Expression and Characterization of Recombinant Human Gelatin Fragments“