from a CHI Natural Products Chemistry, this past April
The Deep Oceans, a Unexplored and Robust Resource for Drug Discovery
*William Fenical, Ph.D., Professor of Oceanography, Director Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego
For more than 50 years, soil-derived actinomycetes provided a major pharmaceutical resource for the discovery of antibiotics and related bioactive compounds. During this period, a major effort was undertaken to examine virtually every terrestrial habitat. The oceans, representing >70% of the Earth’s surface, were never seriously considered as a source for actinomycete diversity. This is because the prevailing view was that actinomycetes were exclusively terrestrial, because the marine environment is far more difficult to sample and because little information was available to insure the successful cultivation of “marine bacteria.” During the last 3-4 years, we have examined tropical marine environments and undertaken a systematic approach to cultivate and identify “marine actinomycetes”, those uniquely adapted to growth in the sea. Our studies have revealed that taxonomically-unique representatives of the all the actinomycete families can readily be isolated in culture. Overall, our results suggest that actinomycetes are a significant component of the deep ocean sediment bacterial communities. At least 13 diverse groups, which appear to be entirely new genera, have been isolated. In culture, we are now observing the production of a diversity of bioactive secondary metabolites, which possess unprecedented carbon skeletons and functionalities. This talk will emphasize the discovery of an entirely new source for chemical diversity for drug discovery. |
