based Institute for OneWorld Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and Amyris Biotechnologies, with a 43-million-dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that has made the battle against malaria one of its most important campaigns. UC Berkeley has issued a royalty-free license to OneWorld and Amyris to make sure the eventual drug is inexpensive enough for widespread use in Africa and Asia, where malaria is common. The research involved a key step last July, when another author Dae-Kyun Ro, project manager at Berkeley, identified the enzyme in wormwood that chemically changes amorphadiene into artemisinic acid. He was able to locate the gene in wormwood after looking for similar genes in the published genome sequences of the plant's relatives - lettuce and the sunflower. The scientists then had to determine how to apply the wormwood gene to yeast so that it manufactures artemisinic acid. But yeast is slow growing, so the team's next goal is to try for the same results in bacteria, which grow faster. --SP 00 05 Local Time 21 05 GMT
