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Sea Squirts Off the Hook

Thursday May 12, 2005

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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

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