Au Revoir Bali, Sayonara Palau: Drug Discovery Goes Local
August 13, 2007
Contact: Christina S. Johnson, csjohnson@ucsd.edu, 858-822-5334
La Jolla – Traditionally, one of the perks of marine natural products research has been the opportunity for exotic island travel to collect specimens whose unusual chemistries might offer insights into making new medicines. Times though are changing. If you were a graduate student or researcher who had the very enviable task of “working” in Palau, Tahiti or Bermuda, consider your timing in the field lucky.
A stunning aerial view of Palau. Photo: Michael Aw
As the field of marine natural products discovery advances, the new crop of graduate students, at least those in Bill Fenical’s research group, will likely be seeing a lot more bench time, plunked down squarely in San Diego, particularly if the topic of interest is a group of marine microbes known as MAR2 actinomycetes. These bacteria are found in marine sediments and are closely related to terrestrial soil bacteria, the source of dozens of household antibiotics, including erythromycin, streptomycin and tetracycline.
Marine bacteria in culture. Photo: Erin Gontang
Fenical, director of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and SIO marine microbiologist Paul Jensen report that for this group of marine bacteria: “Phylogenetic novelty is more important than the geographic origin of the strain.”
Marine bacteria in culture. Photo: Erin Gontang
Translation: Closely related microbes will produce similar compounds; geographic location is not a good metric of evolutionary kinship.
They recommend investigations of MAR2 actinomycetes focus on developing new methods for cultivating the bacteria and of sampling new niches, “as opposed to traveling to remote sites to collect uniform sample types.”
For evidence in support of this conclusion, the scientists cite three phylogenetically related strains of MAR2 actinomycetes extracted from sediments collected from two sites in Palau and one site in San Diego; all produced Marinomycin A, a compound with particularly interesting antibiotic activity. Jensen reported a similar pattern for Salinispora strains collected from vastly separated locales.
In short, novelty comes from scouring the evolutionary tree. Globetrotting not required.
.gif){kind=logo}
