The sprawling Medicago facility in suburban Quebec City smells like a botanical garden and sounds like an airplane hangar. Thousands of Nicotiana benthamiana plants, a close cousin of tobacco, grow in long rows amid noisy ventilation. When the plants are six or seven weeks old, maybe twenty centimetres tall, they go on a journey, lined up by the dozens onto a flatbed that’s then inverted over a tank filled with fluid. The plants get dunked. The tank seals. And the roots are trapped in the air between the liquid and the lid, so a vacuum hose can slip into that space and begin to suck.
The plants act like sponges: apply pressure to the roots and the leaves collapse; release that pressure a minute later and they expand, absorbing the liquid deep into their cells. This particular bath is filled with a bacteria that’s been slightly tweaked. Bits of its DNA have been swapped out for DNA from the spike protein of SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
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