By Meredith Bauer-Mitchell
UF/IFAS
A major challenge with Parkinson’s disease is managing tremors. Typically, one way they are treated is by taking medications that increase dopamine.
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.
“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.
![UF/IFAS-grown velvet beans. [Photo by Eva Sailly, UF/IFAS]](/uploads/original/20260414-163652-d38-tropical bean 2.jpg)
![Left to right: Md Jahidul Islam Shohag, Guodong Liu, and Alaina Anne Kleine, a student in Kelly Balmant’s lab, harvest the final velvet bean pods at the UF/IFAS Plant Science Research and Education Unit (PSREU) in Citra, Florida, as the season ends. [Photo by Eva Sailly, UF/IFAS,]](/uploads/original/20260414-163851-694-tropical bean 1.jpg)
