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Biotech / Medical : Nereus -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike McFarland who wrote (2)	8/28/2006 10:17:33 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19

Here is as good a place as any to park this: Bacterial Symbionts: Prospects for the Sustainable Production of Invertebrate-Derived Pharmaceuticals Piel, J. Kekulé-Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Bonn Current Medicinal Chemistry, Volume 13, Number 1, January 2006, pp. 39-50 Invertebrate animals, such as sponges, tunicates and bryozoans, are among the most important sources of biomedically relevant natural products. However, as these animals generally contain only low quantities of the compounds, further pharmacological development is in most cases difficult. There is increasing evidence that many metabolites, in particular polyketides and nonribosomally synthesized peptides, are not produced by the animals themselves but by associated bacterial symbionts. This symbiont hypothesis currently attracts considerable interest, since it implicates that animal-independent production systems based on bacterial fermentation processes could be created. This review gives an overview about recent developments in the research on natural product symbiosis. Different techniques will be discussed that have been employed to pinpoint the actual producer. Since bacterial symbionts are highly fastidious and have been generally resistant to cultivation attempts, emphasis will be laid on culture-independent strategies, such as cell separation approaches and the cloning of biosynthetic genes. These strategies have provided insights into possible sources of several natural products, e.g. the bryostatins, pederin, the onnamides, swinholide A and theopalauamide. Finally, potential techniques for the generation of renewable supplies of symbiontderived drug candidates will be discussed. Cultivation approaches and the heterologous expression of cloned biosynthesis genes from uncultured symbionts could in future provide access to several important marine drug candidates, including bryostatin 1, halichondrin or ET-743. I suppose the google search for this evening is this: google.com

To: Mike McFarland who wrote (2)	8/29/2006 4:52:07 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19

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.