Bioengineering Innovation Creates Discovery with Ashwagandha
Ashwagandha has been used for thousands of years in traditional medicine and is now recognized for its positive effects on stress and sleep. Getty Images
COS/BioE Professor Jing-Ke Weng recently published research that discovered how to recreate the helpful withanolides in Ashwagandha in a particular yeast strain, creating a new scope for the magnitude of healing properties in the herb.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cody Mello-Klein.
Ashwagandha is having a moment. These researchers opened the door to more life-altering benefits
Ashwagandha is a small shrub that’s having a big moment.
Used in traditional Indian medicine for thousands of years, ashwagandha is now one of the most popular herbal supplements in the U.S. because of its professed benefits for sleep and stress. In the U.S. alone, ashwagandha was the third-most purchased herbal supplement, with sales totaling $144 million in 2024, according to the American Botanical Council. It’s also one of the precious few medicinal herbs that has received the National Institutes of Health’s stamp of approval.
But researcher Jing-Ke Weng thinks ashwagandha can do even more. It just took cracking the plant’s genome to figure that out.
Jing-Ke Weng, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and bioengineering at Northeastern University. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Weng, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and bioengineering at Northeastern University, bioengineered a way of producing withanolides, the compounds responsible for ashwagandha’s benefits, in yeast. Published recently in Nature Plants, it’s a “revolutionary” finding, Weng said, that creates a maximally efficient withanolide factory and opens the door to tapping into ashwagandha’s true potential.
“In the future, we can foresee that we don’t have to grow the plants to get withanolides,” Weng said. “We can simply engineer and optimize this yeast strain to produce the very precise analog we want. Then it really opens the doors for all kinds of drug discovery research in the future.”
The research-backed benefits of ashwagandha include lowering stress and anxiety and improving sleep, according to the NIH. But Weng said it also has the potential to reduce inflammation and assist with cancer therapy.
Cracking open one of the secrets to ashwagandha’s unique properties is the result of seven years of work for Weng and his lab. It required sequencing the plant’s entire genetic blueprint, or genome, which led to the discovery of six new enzymes, macromolecules like proteins that operate as catalysts for bioactivity.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News