Scientist at Work Blog: From Marine Ecology to Drug Discovery

Mark Hay, a biology professor at Georgia Tech, writes from Fiji, where he is investigating coral-seaweed competition in the coral reefs.

Friday, Oct. 21

I often hear someone lament that the era of great adventures is over: ?I was born too late.? In terms of finding new lands, agreed; but in terms of finding new intellectual adventures, this is dead wrong. For discovery of new biological and ecological understanding, we live in the most adventurous time ever. Our field expeditions are often conducted much like those of 100 years ago, but this expedition research ends up producing compounds that can be identified only through the use of today?s most cutting-edge technology.

In Fiji, one sees clearly that human health and the environment are linked. We have experienced ciguatera poisoning from being served fish that fed on the toxic dinoflagellates that produce this poison, and we have experienced the considerable discomfort of dengue fever (called bone-break fever for how it makes you feel), which is spread by mosquitoes under certain environmental conditions.

Here, we use ecological research financed largely by the National Science Foundation to inform a search for useful drugs from marine organisms that is financed largely by the National Institutes of Health. In these investigations, the ?white coat? findings of our lab studies result in compounds being patented as possible anti-malarial, antibiotic, or anti-cancer drugs, but the ?wet suit? parts of these studies begin on isolated islands and in rudimentary boats where we live in Fijian culture, sleep on a ship deck where a goat was just slaughtered for dinner, and have to dodge sharks while collecting chemically rich seaweeds that produce bioactive compounds with potential for drug development.

The connection between ecology and drug discovery started for us when we realized that prey species were turning production of defensive traits off and on as needed for different enemies. As an example, the simple phytoplankton Phaeocystis could, via chemical senses alone, ?smell? its neighbors being attacked, identify the attacking enemy and alter its traits in opposite directions (becoming larger or smaller, solitary or colonial) depending on the traits that deterred feeding by that particular enemy. This alteration caused the phytoplankton?s palatability to decrease by as much as 95 percent within three days of smelling an attack.

Seaweeds and some marine invertebrates show similar changes. Thus, many prey are more variable biochemically than was initially realized. By using our ecological insights to ?turn on? prey defenses, we have increased our rates of discovery of possible medicines from marine organisms. As an example, our collaborating chemists and ecologists (from Georgia Tech, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the University of the South Pacific) have discovered 33 previously unknown bioactive molecules from the red seaweed Callophycus. Some of these compounds show potent activities in antibacterial, anti-cancer, or anti-malaria assays, and patents have been filed for developing Callophycus compounds as anti-malarial drugs.

Although the final stages of the drug development research occur in technologically advanced laboratory settings, the initial stages of finding new species, learning to turn on increased compound production and so forth, are dependent on field scientists accessing remote and unexplored natural habitats, and often doing so under trying conditions of heavy seas, little communication and few of the comforts of the modern world. For us that is coral reefs in remote regions like the Lau Group in Fiji ? in most of these regions there are no beds, no electricity, no dependable drinking water.

On a recent trip, there were more than 30 people on a ?ship? that could sleep about 10. This necessitated a space on the deck serving as a butcher shop for disassembling a goat at 4 p.m., a lab bench for processing samples at 5 p.m., a dining table at 7 p.m., and a bed at 10 p.m., with each event separated by a ?cleaning? consisting of five gallons of seawater dumped across the deck.

By combining air travel, molecular sciences and careful chemistry with a hunt for the wild that still exists in some places, an adventurous ecologist today can get to more places than ever before, and explore them in greater depth than our colleagues of long ago could ever imagine. Three centuries ago, Sir Isaac Newton noted that he was just a child picking up shells on the seashore, while the great ocean of undiscovered truth lay all before him. Our world for discovery is no less vast; today scientists can set sail on a sea of discovery that dwarfs those of previous adventurers.

Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=bd786fa9dc4f3db116f66658395526b2

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