How a tropical bean could help treat Parkinson's tremors

UF/IFAS researchers launch study of velvet beans as a potential plant-based Parkinson’s disease treatment.

The research addresses global access challenges to Parkinson’s disease medications by evaluating velvet bean cultivars globally to understand how genetics, environment and cultivation affect LDOPA production, with field trials underway in Central Florida.

In collaboration with UF Health, scientists are also looking at more consumer-friendly plants to potentially boost L-DOPA levels in commonly eaten crops like fava beans and soybeans.

A major challenge with Parkinson’s disease is managing tremors. Typically, one way they are treated is by taking medications that increase dopamine.

But what if instead, the prescription could be a plate of beans?

That’s what researchers at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) want to test in a newly funded study looking into the effect of velvet beans as a treatment for symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s disease affects more than 1.1 million people in the U.S., according to the Parkinson’s Foundation. Tremors that affect daily life are a challenging part of the disease, and one treatment for those symptoms is called levodopa, which becomes dopamine in the brain to help manage proper muscle movement.

The challenge is that the medication can be difficult to get in certain regions of the globe, so researchers began looking into plants that might produce the same compounds that can be grown worldwide.

Researchers at the UF/IFAS Department of Horticultural Sciences were aware that velvet beans naturally produce compounds that are used in medications to treat symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Specifically, the bean contains L-DOPA, the primary active ingredient of the medication levodopa.

A group of researchers standing next to a velvet bean plant

“Velvet bean produces unusually high levels of L-DOPA compared to most other plants,” said Jeongim Kim, associate professor of horticultural sciences and  Biochemical Genetics Lab lead. “We want to understand how that compound is made and how its production is regulated.”

Researchers across UF/IFAS, in collaboration with the UF Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases, are working on creating new cultivars of velvet beans that have more L-DOPA. This will help them understand how the plants create the compound and how it can be used as a potential treatment. The project aligns with a broader interest in how agriculture can contribute to human health, a focus of the UF Food is Medicine Initiative.

To understand how genetics, environment and cultivation practices shape L-DOPA levels in velvet bean varieties, a collection of velvet bean cultivars from Africa, Latin America, Europe and the United States was assembled and is now being evaluated at the UF/IFAS Plant Science Research and Education Unit in Citra, Florida.

“Some accessions produce very small amounts, while others produce extremely high levels,” said Kelly Balmant, assistant professor of horticultural sciences, whose lab is working to sequence the velvet bean genome and analyze gene expression across the different cultivars.

Kelly Balmant, assistant professor of horticultural sciences and lead of bioinformatics & transformation at the Crop Transformation Center, works to connect plant traits with the genes that control them

Genetic work is important because velvet beans don’t yet have the advanced genomic resources that well-studied, major commodity crops like corn or soybeans have. Her team is working on understanding how the genes affect how the compound is produced in the bean.

The team will also work on making velvet beans more palatable to American consumers. Velvet beans have itchy, irritating hairs on the outside of the pods, which plant breeding or other strategies could help change while keeping the L-DOPA levels.

At the same time, Kim is also looking beyond velvet beans and into other L-DOPA-producing vegetable options. Because velvet beans aren’t widely consumed in the United States, the team is exploring whether the project’s insights could be used to boost the small amounts of naturally occurring L-DOPA in plants people already eat, such as fava beans or soybeans, bringing them closer to what velvet beans can produce. 

“With this project, there’s a direct connection to helping people. There’s a real link to alleviating human suffering, and that makes the work feel especially meaningful,” said Max Munro, a  Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology (PMCB) student and research fellow in Kim’s lab.

The study is funded by the UF/IFAS Projects Linking Agriculture and Therapeutic Medicine for Every Diet (PLANTMED) seed funding program, which supports research into Food is Medicine projects, as well as the UF Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases.

The study also includes neurologist  Dr. Michael Okun of the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases; Adegbola Adesogan, director of the UF/IFAS Global Food Systems Institute; Guodong “David” Lui, associate professor of horticultural sciences; Marcio Resende, associate professor of horticultural sciences; Kari Basso, scientist and director of the Mass Spectrometry Research and Education Center in the Department of Chemistry; and Greg Hudalla, professor from the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering.