Advances in Drug Discovery to Help Algal Bloom Research
Contact:
William H. Gerwick, Professor
Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
& Scripps Institution of Oceanography
E.: wgerwick@ucsd.edu
T.: (858) 534-0578
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Revised:
May 3, 2011
William Gerwick, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and UCSD's Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, has Sea Grant funding to study metabolite production in cyanobacteria. Credit: SIO/UCSD
May 3, 2011
Contact: Christina S. Johnson, csjohnson@ucsd.edu, 858-822-5334
Harmful algal bloom research may get a boost from the technologies now under development for drug discovery.
Researchers at the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego have recently demonstrated the ability to monitor the steps and timing of metabolite production in photosynthetic bacteria.
The work, published in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes the ability to culture cyanobacteria of the genus Lyngbya in a medium spiked with heavy nitrogen (the stable isotope 15N) and to then track the incorporation of this nitrogen into multiple natural products, vis-a-vis mass spectrometry.
Magnified images reveal growth of a single Lyngbya filament over 10 days. Credit: SIO/UCSD
(Lyngbya was the organism selected for the experiments as it produces a group of pharmacologically intriguing neurotoxins.)
By comparing the relative amounts of the nitrogen isotope in the different compounds, scientists can study the effects of varying environmental conditions on biosynthesis. Such comparisons will -- it is hoped -- make it possible to identify the growing conditions that trigger high yields of compounds of biomedical potential.
From a coastal management perspective, this same line of logic is exactly what is needed to fully understand what causes harmful algal blooms and toxin production.
Adam Jones, a Scripps graduate student and Sea Grant Trainee on a project led by Scripps professor William Gerwick, says that similar experiments as those presented in the PNAS paper could be duplicated on bloom-forming cyanobacteria, to get an idea of the environmental conditions that might slow rates of toxin formation.
To read more about this research, please visit Scripps News at http://sio.ucsd.edu/Announcements/Gerwick_biosynthesis/
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