Growing Allergy Relief
By Elizabeth
Weise, USA TODAY
An
Australian scientist has come up with a hypoallergenic ryegrass without
the major allergens that plague millions of hay fever sufferers. His
collaborators in the USA hope to begin the world's first field trials on
the plants in Oklahoma next year.
If
the trials are successful, there may be less sniffling and sneezing in
the future for Americans. The far future, admittedly: It would take as
long as a decade for the public to see actual results.
Still,
researcher German Spangenberg of La Trobe University in Victoria takes
the long view: One day, "fewer people will suffer because of these
grasses," he says.
Ryegrass,
a prolific pollen producer, is a cool-season grass grown primarily
across the center of the country and in the Pacific Northwest. It's also
used as a winter grass in the South and as forage for grazing animals.
It's a major pollen allergen in temperate climates in spring. Even where
it's not a major grass variety, it causes suffering because of its heavy
pollen production, Spangenberg says.
More
than 50 million Americans suffer allergies. Of those, 35 million get hay
fever during the March-through-August hay fever season. For 26 million
of them, the primary allergen is ragweed, which isn't just one plant but
a group of 17 wild weed species that are wind-pollinated, says Mike
Tringale of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. The other nine
million are primarily allergic to grass, tree and mold pollens. However,
all 35 million are likely to be at least somewhat allergic to the other
kinds of pollen, so a hypoallergenic ryegrass would help them to at
least some extent.
Each
ryegrass pollen has five outer coats. Spangenberg and his team disarmed
the first two using a technique in which the gene that produces the
allergen is taken out and returned backwards.
So
far, testing has shown no other effects on the grass beyond the absence
of sneeze-producing proteins, Spangenberg says.
Zeng-yu
Wang of the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation in Ardmore, Okla., is the
U.S. side of the team. He hopes to begin open field testing next year to
see how far the pollen spreads and whether it can interbreed with other
grasses to produce other non-allergen varieties.
"It's
exciting work, there's no doubt about that," says Donald Pulver, an
allergist with the University of Rochester in New York. But ryegrass is
only part of the hay fever problem, he cautions.
"You
can knock out the perennial rye, but you've still got Timothy, Kentucky
blue and fescue," he says.
To
give hay fever sufferers a real break you'd have to bioengineer the
dozens of domesticated and wild grasses found in the USA, says Andrew
Saxon, chief of UCLA's Division of Clinical Immunology and Allergy.
"I'm not sure how that's going to help to take it out of just one
grass."
And
there are a lot of questions that would have to be answered before we'd
want to be planting transgenic grass in our lawns, says Jane Rissler
with the Union of Concerned Scientists. There are often unintended
consequences for this kind of genetic tinkering, she says.
William
Meyer of Rutgers University, a turf grass breeding expert, says a larger
question is who will pay for it.
"I'm
not sure how many farmers would care. It's one of those things where
you'd have to do it for the good of the country."
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