In the current issue of the journal Chemistry and Biology, scientists at Scripps, the University of Minnesota and the Life Sciences Institute describe the development of "bryA," a gene that could help solve problems associated with the production of anticancer agents originally discovered in the marine invertebrate Bugula neritina.
"To be able to show that this gene really exists has been the Holy Grail for the last 10 years," said Scripps Professor Margo Haygood, a coauthor of the paper. "This takes us beyond just suspecting that a bacteria might be involved to actually having a gene that looks like the right thing."
Certain marine invertebrates such as Bugula neritina, a brown bryozoan animal with stringy tufts, live in a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that act as a chemical defense mechanism for the host animal.
In 2001, Haygood and other scientists in her Scripps laboratory found that such bacteria living in Bugula neritina were the source of bryostatins, a family of chemical compounds being closely studied for their potential as anticancer pharmaceuticals in leukemia, lymphoma and several cancers including colon, breast, ovarian and prostate.
One of the main obstacles impeding widespread bryostatin production is lack of a practical and economically viable method of producing the compounds. The bacteria cannot be grown in laboratories. And collecting vast numbers of the animals at sea would be environmentally destructive.
One way of solving this dilemma is to clone the genes involved in natural bryostatin development. In the Chemistry and Biology paper, the researchers describe the process by which they cloned a large complex of genes and si
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Contact: Mario Aguilera or Cindy Clark
scrippsnews@ucsd.edu
858-534-3624
University of California - San Diego
10-Dec-2004