LiveScience's Image of the Day

Sea Squirts Off the Hook

Thursday May 12, 2005

More Images...

Attention sea squirts everywhere: you can rest at ease. You will no longer be hunted by scientists craving your disease-fighting innards.

Scientists have long harvested sea squirts for the natural disease-fighting substances they produce. Only recently did scientists discover that it is actually the bacterium Prochloron didemnii that lives inside the sea squirt that produces the compound patellimide, which may be useful for cancer treatment some day. But because scientists could not cultivate the Prochloron in a laboratory dish, the sea squirt harvest continued.

By scouring the genomic sequences of both the sea squirt and the bacterium for sequences responsible for instructing patellamide synthesis, scientists determined that the bacterium had been producing the substance all along. Now that the sequence and its owner were known, scientists were able to transplant the sequence into another species of bacterium, E. coli, and produce patellamide compounds in the lab - effectively ending the need for sea squirt harvesting.

"This project revealed detailed information about the metabolic capabilities of Prochloron, details that proved to be difficult to determine by other means, " said Patrick Dennis, manager for Prochloron genome sequencing at the National Science Foundation. "Furthermore," he added, "by producing patellamides in the lab, the team demonstrated an important proof of principle for the biosynthesis of naturally occurring marine products."

This research was done by scientists from The Institute for Genomic Research, the University of Utah and the University of California, San Diego, and reported in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

--Bjorn Carey

Credit: Adriaan Gittenberger

Advertisement

From the Blogs

LiveScience Blogs
  1. The Bug Hunt Is On. Target: Marine Aliens
  2. HARPS Discovery - HD 40307 And Its Three Super-Earths
  3. Can This British Columbia Lake Tell Us Something About Life On Other Planets?
  4. Power Equals Positive Action But Only When Acquired Legitimately
  5. X Chromosome Gets Some Respect As An Evolutionary Tool
  6. Estrogen Therapy May Limit Strokes In Women - But The Timing Has To Be Right
  7. Reminder: Garth Sundem's Foolproof Equations On The Science Channel Tonight At 6PM
  1. 6.15.2008 | Tariq Malik
    Father?s Day on Earth, in Space
    t’s Father’s Day on Earth, and just in time for the seven-astronaut crew of NASA’s shuttle Discovery, which landed yesterday in... ...
  2. 6.14.2008 | Robert Roy Britt
    Cutting the Technotether That Ruins Your Life
    he deluge of office and personal email and IM and texting, along with web surfing, putzing with iTunes and so on has workers increasingly distracted... ...

Related Items from the LiveScience Store

  1. Go to Store
  2. Go to Store

More Stores to Explore

Environment

View all

Environmentally Friendly New Jet Planned

The 'easyJet ecoJet' would emit 50 percent less CO2 than today's newest ...

Scientists Get Closer to Center of the Earth

A new technique pinpoints Earth's center of ...

Scorching Summers in Store for Mediterranean

Summers in Mediterranean could become ...

Animals

View all

Young Lizards Dressed For Success

Mother side-blotched lizards know best when it comes to color patterns in ...

Mysterious Bee Deaths Linked to Pesticides

Scientists seeing if chemicals are responsible for honeybee ...

Huge Bird-Like Dinosaur Discovered

Scientists unearthed a gigantic bird-like dinosaur that weighed as much as ...

Technology

View all

Model Predicts Mob Behavior

Prototype models how people behave in emergencies and crowd ...

Cheap Lamps Made with Aluminum Foil

Our lives may soon be lit by skinny panels made of aluminum ...

Spam King Gone, Spam Rolls On

The arrest of a spam kingpin does little to deter ...