The crisper effect: Plants that heal, kill, aid in defence

Can a banana be a snack and a vaccine? Could a cabbage wield a scorpion’s sting?

- Bhanuj Kappal

In labs around the world, scientists are quietly reshaping ideas of what a vegetable can be, as experiments reach for goals far beyond the traditional ones of higher yields, greater nutrition and better taste. Take a look.

The farm-to-table vaccine

The effort to create edible vaccines began in the early 1990s, when researchers first realised that plants could be modified to create foreign proteins, including viral and bacterial antigens.

By the turn of the millennium, Charles Arntzen and his team at Cornell University's Boyce Thompson Institute, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Maryland, had developed and tested the word's first edible vaccine: transgenic potatoes that produced antigens for the Norwalk virus (a common cause of the stomach flu).

The potatoes never went past the experimental stage, but in the years since, researchers have genetically modified lettuce, carrots, tomatoes and bananas to produce antigens for diseases ranging from cholera and hepatitis B to rabies and HIV.