India, Aug. 7 -- Scientists announced on Thursday that they have engineered lettuce and tobacco plants to produce myoglobin - the protein that gives meat its red colour, its iron content, and much of its distinctive taste - directly inside their leaves.

The results, published in Frontiers in Plant Science, are being described as the first stable production of an animal meat protein in an edible crop.

The study was carried out by researchers at Imperial College London and Cambridge biotech Kyomei Ltd, working with collaborators in California and China. Two of the study's authors are employed by Kyomei, which partly funded the doctoral research behind the work, the paper disclosed.

The paper matters because myoglobin is the single molecu...