Deadly Nipah virus infections are on the increase

"Griffithsin and its synthetictrimeric tandemer (3mG) are under animal trial, showing promising results."

reference from Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity:

here

Red Cross warning to an unprepared world.

 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/30/world-dangerously-unprepared-for-next-pandemic-ifrc

A refresher for those who have been reading these posts or an introduction to those who are new here follows:

GRFT, or Griffithsin is an antiviral lectin. It has shown to inhibit infection by a number of viruses while being itself nontoxic. Project GRFT has a goal of producing GRFT by expression of the gene (derived from a red seaweed) in Oryza (rice).  As rice is a widely grown food crop in many countries of the world, this method has the potential to empower farming communities with limited resources a means to combat viral outbreaks that will undoubtedly occur in the future. We feel that our efforts support global public health, a basic human right.

It should be noted that both Griffithsin and rice are considered nontoxic and safe.

Project GRFT is a group of friends who are volunteering to develop technology to do large scale global biomanufacturing of GRFT through plant molecular biology. 

Project GRFT does not have as its intent to produce pharmaceuticals but rather to provide the raw material for biomanufacturing which we may perhaps call "GRICE"  

As a project of Counter Culture Labs we have non-profit status and we always welcome your donations, both of money and in-kind donations such as supplies (petri dishes, reagents, etc.).  

We are now working in three fully functional laboratories. 

One is located at Counter Culture Labs in Oakland, California

Another is located in Baltimore Maryland at Johns Hopkins University

The newest lab is located near Modesto, California 

This is our effort to respond to the challenge described in the Red Cross warning.  

Project GRFT gene gun

 

project GRFT has set up our first gene gun.  It was designed and built by physicist and inventor David Johnson PhD.  In the video he fires the first shot from the gene gun in the new lab environment.  DNA plasmid coated Au microparticles are shot into a rice callus which will then be incubated at 25C.  Compressed Helium gas provides the force to propel the particles into the plant cells.  

project GRFT does particle bombardment

 Project GRFT, after setting up our gene gun is shooting DNA coated microparticles into rice calluses.

Two of our volunteers, Kat and Patrick, in the hood and washing the Au microparticles with ethanol.

They are using molecular biology grade ethanol and we do 3 washes

after adding the ethanol -

time to vortex!

2018 article on GRFT/Rice

https://share.america.gov/how-rice-could-ward-off-hiv-infections/

Rice plate

 

Kat, Patrick and Grier check the plates in the incubator

Every organism has a food they like.  We feed the rice calluses by plating the embryos on Callus Induction Media (CIM) 

They are masses of cells and with care will eventually grow into rice plants 

As they grow we break them apart.

We re-plate the pieces and the pieces grow. 

Callus growth is slow and we are working on monitoring how much growth takes place over time.  

Every organism thrives in a certain temperature range.

The incubator is set at 25C for the calluses.

The calluses on CIM are kept in the dark.  

At later stages different media is used and light is introduced so that photosynthesis can occur and then roots and shoots form.

Another confirmation of the power of GRFT

 "Quite possibly, the most encouraging inhibitor of MERS-CoV is Griffithsin, a 12.7 kDa lectin found in the Griffithsia species (red-green growth). It has three sugar restricting areas that permit it to tie accurately to glycans on CoV protein spikes and forestall viral connection to have cells, with extraordinary strength exhibited in vitro concentrates against MERS-CoV (EC50 of 0.125 M) and various CoV strains (EC50 of 0.00320.33 M) (Millet et al., 2016). Griffithsin additionally seems to have a low foundational poisonousness, with an explicitness list of 303100 against HcoV cells (contrasted with human colorectal adenocarcinoma or fibroblast cell lines) (O’Keefe et al., 2010), demonstrating that it very well may be one of the leading contenders for the animal and clinical preliminaries against SARS-CoV-2 (Mani et al., 2020)."

excerpt from:

In silico investigation and potential therapeutic approaches of natural products for COVID-19: Computer-aided drug design perspective

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2022.929430/full