Ricin is a potent lethal cytotoxin derived from castor seeds and combatting its toxicity is a tedious task.Currently no effective antidote has ever been formulated so far and makes therapy difficult.It also places the victims survival purely as a matter of chance.As chemotherapy andd other mehods fail to produce productive results,scientists have started to employ vaccines as a possible tool to tackle the toxin.

US researchers from Army Laboratory in Frederick have found a vaccine containing an inactivated toxin that selectively retains an activity to boost the immune system without inducing lethal toxicity to mount systemic defence response in the body by protein engineering princples and found to be effective on animal models.The US Army has reported that currently trials are underway in 30 human volunteers and plans to conduct clinical trials as well at Fort Detrick.

Vaccines are powerful tools to produce solutions in a timely consistent and biologically safe way.Historical credits to vaccines in global health are something extraordinary  with reference to pathogenic diseases and attempts such as this to focus on vaccine vehicles and expanding their horizon to toxins neutralization would most probably yield a fruitful result in future to address the problems of global threat from castor toxin.

For reference: http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/News/FeedsAP/2011/04/army-starts-clinical-trials-on-ricin-vaccine/

Castor cake is a by product from castor seed but remains as a substance with restricted application potential due to its allergenic and toxic properties.People traditionally have treated the castor cake by wild fermentation for the catalytic transformation of anti-metabolites into their corresponding non-toxic forms for improving its utility.

This age-old practice was scientifically approached by the Brazilian researchers where they subjected castor cake to solid state fermentation.Penicillium simplicissimum fungus was chosen as the catalytic factor because of its potency to manipulate in castor cake substrate and generate lipid metabolizing lipase enzymes.Solid state fermentation(dessicated fermentation) was performed for the cultivation of fungus and the products, enzyme and fermented castor cake were partitioned by solid-liquid phase differential extraction.Enzyme lipase magnitude in crude isolated fraction was determined from its activity against synthetic substrate while the debris cake fermented was evaluated for its toxic protein contents and functional activities by immunoassays and immuno sensitive cell culture assays respectively.The results proved to be promising as the toxin titre and allergens induced cell degranulation were seen to be minimum and the microbial enzyme production was noticed to a significant extent as well from specific activity studies.

Results turn out to be promising but the experiment would have been better if an utility for the fermented castor cake in biology was defined.The solid state technology by fungus seems to be a viable one on commodities like castor cake to generate high value products when time factor is not signified to a greater extent.

For referencehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/14281716/Use-of-a-Lowcost-Methodology-for-Bio-Detoxification-of-Castor-Bean-Waste

Ricin is a noxious cytotoxin present in castor bean.People have long been pursuing research to understand its functional activities,physical structure and quantitative magnitude in beans etc.In spite of such extensive studies, no effective solution has been formulated to ricin intoxication. However researchers have found vaccine therapy as a promising route to combat the toxin.In ricin vaccinology, the wild toxin has been modified in such a way so that it tends to retain its antigenicity to boost the host defence system but not the toxic activity, called it as “ricin toxoid”.Genetic engineering  is a standardized technique to precisely produce variants in ricin and the candidate with expected property are subsequently chosen.

US scientists have identified an elite ricin toxoid from earlier studies and made an evaluation on vaccine formulation to achieve enhanced antigenicity and stability.Initially they treated the protein in phosphate buffer solution and found structural and functional tolerance in protein after cyclic exposures to extreme temperature ranges.To further improve its adjuvant adherence and related antigenicity, toxoid was treated with aluminium hydroxide adjuvant in succinate buffer and evaluated by differential centrifugation and immuno assays.The results indicated that aluminium hydroxide showed a good compatibility with toxoid by co-sedimentation of protein with gel matrix and also elicited a strong immune response, confirmed by antibody titre studies.Functional confirmation did not seem to be significantly affected by conjugation with adjuvant and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy was applied to understand it.

Scientists in this study have made a complete profile in ricin vaccine formulation and its influence in conferring active immunity to primitive model systems but the confirmation is to be arrived from human clinical trials as extrapolation of data from mice to humans is difficult .

For reference: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=usarmyresearch&sei-redir=1#search=”ricin+breakth

Ricin toxin from castor seeds has been well established as a cytotoxin interferring with ribosomal functions.The activity of any protein generally is conferred by the domains present in it. This made scientists to probe the domains and  critical amino acids for the cytotoxic activity of ricin. Researchers in USA have made molecular analysis of castor bean toxin at the genetic level where tools of genetic engineering are exploited to address their domain mapping studies.The experimentation involved synthetic mutation process in genetic determinants of ricin protein for hypothetical amino acid, glutamate to alanine which basically is distant to the former constituent in terms of its physio-chemical properties and makes it an ideal substituent to understand the magnitude of glutamate in the ricin function.Their data in the end from mutant protein’s activity indicated that the target glutamate is not of primary significance in ricin’ toxicological function.

Domain mapping by mutations is an iterative process but an intense technique to make a complete scrutiny of the sub components in a complex molecule and their implications to the ultimate emergence of functions from bulk.

For reading:http://mcb.asm.org/cgi/reprint/9/11/5012.pdf