Rubber science eats shoots and (now) leaves

London – Efforts to commercialise the production of natural rubber from plants such as guayule and the Kazak dandelions, could receive help from yet another unexpected source – the humble lettuce.

The discovery follows research by Dae-Kyun Ro, associate professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary, who has recently published the results of a seven-year study in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The research, led by professor Ro and PhD student Yang Qu, used lettuce stems to identify one of the key enzymes required to synthesise natural rubber in lettuce and other plants.

According to the University of Calgary, the team’s findings “represent the first natural biosynthetic model for rubber production supported by concrete experimental data in over 50 years of research.”

For his work, Ro relied on lettuce as his base model to dissect the molecular mechanism governing the natural rubber biosynthesis in this plant, said the university report.

According to Ro, “Once lettuce starts bolting (when an elongated stalk with flowers grows from within the main stem of the lettuce plant, causing bitter flavour in the lettuce leaves), its stem can produce milky latex, which contains biopolymer — natural rubber.”

“This makes lettuce an ideal plant model, because it is an annual plant that cross-pollinates itself, and multiple generations can be analysed in a year,” he added

The team’s work is reviving pioneering work done in the late 1920s by Thomas Edison. Together with the Firestone and Ford companies, the visionary inventor had established the Edison Botanic Research Corporation to produce natural rubber from a source other than rubber trees.