Seaweed: Potential Source of New Antimalarial Drug?
Julia Kubanek, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biology, describes research into antifungal compounds found on the surfaces of tropical seaweed collected in the Fiji Islands. The compounds may have possible applications for treating malaria.
Transcript
00:00:00 since 2003 a group of scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech have been involved with a project that's funded by the National Institutes of Health where we are tasked with discovering new drugs and preserving natural resources based on environments that have the potential to deliver us new drugs but have been understudied in the past and may be in need of protection from environmental
00:00:28 degradation one of the big natural enemies in a marine environment are waterborne microbes so seawater is full of infectious and pathogenic microorganisms and these can cause infections in the organisms that live their whole lives in these coral reef environments so trying to think like a seaweed or like a marine sponge led us to imagine that they might be producing
00:00:53 chemicals in their tissues or on their tissues that could ward off disease we noticed this one particular seaweed which is called Calif aika serratus that was rare in a global sense we found an island in Fiji where it was very abundant and not only was an abundant but it appeared to not be fouled by microorganisms its surfaces were fairly clean and fresh and didn't look like it
00:01:20 had been the target of these microorganisms number of students and I and a collaborator mark a were able to collect it with scuba and also even by snorkeling when it was found in especially shallow waters we broached collaboration with a chemist at Georgia Tech named facundo fernandez and professor Fernandez's lab specializes in designing new instrumentation to tackle
00:01:43 interesting chemical problems and what we wanted to do was chemically image the surface of the seaweed to see what molecules were on top of the seaweed this provided a charge stream of droplets that lifted the molecules off of the surface of the seaweed suck those molecules into the mass spectrometer and read out as Peaks the molecular size the molecular weight of those molecules and
00:02:08 from comparing the peaks from authentic standards of Roma Phi collide molecules we could show that in act on the surface of the sea weeds there were patches areas of the seaweed where we could see intense signals representative of the broma fica light molecules what this means from the seaweeds point of view is that it is deploying its antifungal protection in
00:02:32 discrete bits there's patches on the surface where there are high concentrations of these chemicals and in those areas the fungi cannot colonize they cannot infect we think that what the seaweed is doing is that it's deploying the high concentrations of the antifungal defenses at vulnerable areas because of cracks in the surface or lice cells or broken torn parts it's a little
00:02:56 bit like putting a band-aid on a wound in this case it's a band-aid that contains its own medicine once we determined that the seaweed was using these potent chemicals for its own defense against microbes we thought well maybe humans could also learn from these lessons and study the molecular structure of these compounds and see whether or not they might be useful as
00:03:17 pharmaceutical agents what we know so far is that these broma fica light molecules are a promising lead group of substances to treat malaria as a disease in humans when we look at a coral reef and we see thousands of different species of plants and animals all of them are interacting with each other and many of those interactions are based on chemical cues not just sight and sound
00:03:41 like we communicate so often those chemical cues formal language that is scientists we have the opportunity to study we have the opportunity to learn how that language affects the natural structure of ecosystems and we have the opportunity to take some of these lessons and apply them to better the lives of each other you