Sustainable Use of Our Marine Resources

With discovery of marine bioproducts comes the challenge of developing techniques for the sustainable use of the organisms that are the source of these discoveries. Aquaculture, in vitro production (or cell culture), microbial fermentation and recombinant production offer biological alternatives to harvesting the source organisms. Harbor Branch is involved in research on each of these approaches.

Funded by grants from NIH and NOAA Sea Grant to Drs. Susan Sennett, Shirley Pomponi, Julie Olson, Jose Lopez and Peter McCarthy, research continues on developing methods for in vitro production of marine-derived compounds. This research involves localizing the site of production of the bioactive compounds in microbial or sponge cells, identifying genes involved in growth regulation of sponge cells, and using biosynthetic precursors to enhance in vitro production of the compounds.

Using DNA microarray technology to study the genome of sponges that produce biomedically-important chemicals is the subject of a NOAA Sea Grant awarded to Dr. Shirley Pomponi and Robin Willoughby, in partnership with Research Genetics, Inc. (Huntsville, AL). Microarrays provide a means for large-scale surveys of genomes. We are using this technique to screen the genome of a target sponge, identify genes involved in the production of bioactive compounds by the sponge, and develop in vitro methods for production of the compounds.

It has been hypothesized that many macroorganism-derived chemicals are actually produced by microbial symbionts. Developing methods to increase the recovery and culturability of novel microorganisms from deep water sponges is the focus of a NOAA Sea Grant awarded to Drs. Julie Olson and Peter McCarthy in partnership with Novartis. Traditional methods for isolating microbes are believed to recover less than 1 to 10% of the microbes that occur in marine organisms and sediments. This project focuses on determining the genetic diversity within the microbial community associated with deep water sponges, defining the environmental conditions which support microbial growth, developing culture media to enhance microbial growth under laboratory conditions, and discovering microbes that produce bioactive compounds.