When SMU researcher Alexander Chase was a young boy, the sheer diversity of plants in Earth’s tropical rainforests fascinated him.
When SMU researcher Alexander Chase was a young boy, the sheer diversity of plants in Earth’s tropical rainforests fascinated him. He found himself wondering, what new species were out there, waiting to be unearthed? That curiosity is why Chase now collects samples from Earth’s oceans using a new technique called Small Molecule In situ Resin Capture (SMIRC), which could be the first step in uncovering compounds that lead to next-generation antibiotics.
Microbial natural products come from microorganisms, or microbes, and account for many of today’s essential medicines, including most antibiotics. Microbes are too small to see without a microscope and produce a wide variety of chemical compounds as part of their lifespan, some of which are useful for pharmaceutical applications. Traditionally, these compounds are discovered using a ‘microbe-first’ approach, where individual strains are cultured in the laboratory from a sample picked up in the wild.
While this method has been effective, it has become increasingly difficult for researchers to use it to uncover new chemical “scaffolds”, which serve as the foundation upon which chemical compounds are built. Chemical scaffolds are a critical resource for drug discovery.
Read more at: Southern Methodist University
Photo Credit: Southern Methodist University
