Ashwagandha ka Future: Scientists ne Yeast se Banaya Stress-Relief Compound

Ashwagandha, a popular supplement, is known for its effect on stress and sleep. Researchers recreated its compounds in yeast, making a potential 
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.

Alongside graduate student and lead author Erin Reynolds, 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.