publication date: Jan 4, 2012
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author/source: JIC Press Office
Scientists are about to make publicly available all the
data they have so far on the genetic blueprint of medicinal plants and what
beneficial properties are encoded by the genes identified.
The resources, to be released on Thursday, follow a $6
million initiative to study how plant genes contribute to producing various
chemical compounds, some of which are medicinally important.
"Our major goal has been to capture the genetic
blueprints of medicinal plants for the advancement of drug discovery and
development," said Joe Chappell, professor of plant biochemistry in the
University of Kentucky College of Agriculture and coordinator for the Medicinal
Plant Consortium (MPC).
Project partner Dr Sarah O'Connor at the John Innes
Centre will now work with her research group towards the first full genetic
sequence of a medicinal plant and will also experiment with combining
beneficial properties from different plants to create the first new-to-nature
compounds derived from plants. A priority focus will be compounds with
anticancer activity.
"Fewer and fewer new drugs have been successfully making
it to the marketplace over the last 10 years, in large part because of a
reliance on chemical synthesis for making new chemicals," said Chappell.
"Somehow in our fast-track lives, we forgot to take
advantage of the lessons provided by Mother Nature. That is all changing now
with the recognition that two-thirds of all currently prescribed drugs can be
traced back to natural sources and the development of resources such as those
in the MPC to facilitate new drug discovery activities."
Some well-known medicines have come from plants. The once
ubiquitous foxglove gives us the cardiac muscle stimulant digoxin. The periwinkle
plant offers a source for the widely used chemotherapy drugs vincristine and
vinblastine. These and many other
medicinal plants, often commonly found in household gardens and flower boxes,
harbour a wealth of compounds ripe for medicinal applications.
"Just as the sensory properties of plants interact with
and trigger your sense of smell, plants' natural compounds can target and cause
a reaction within your body. This gives
them tremendous pharmaceutical potential," said Chappell.
During this two-year project researchers set out to
develop a collection of data that would aid in understanding how plants make
chemicals, a process called biosynthesis.
This knowledge ultimately could make it possible to engineer plants to
produce larger quantities of medicinally useful compounds as well as different
versions with other therapeutic potential.
To develop the resources, the researchers studied the
genes and chemical profiles of 14 plants known for medicinal properties or
compounds with biological activity.
These included plants such as foxglove, ginseng, and periwinkle. The findings will help researchers discover
how nature's chemical diversity is created and enable them to uncover new drug
candidates or increase the efficacy of existing ones.
"The current understanding of molecules and genes
involved in the formation of beneficial compounds is very incomplete," said
O'Connor, who is also a lecturer in chemical sciences at University of East
Anglia.
"However, the ability to conduct genome-wide studies of
model plant species has resulted in an explosive increase in our knowledge of
and capacity to understand how genes control biological processes and chemical
composition".
The MPC project includes participants from the University
of Kentucky, Michigan State University, Iowa State University, the University
of Mississippi, Purdue University, Texas A&M University, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and the John Innes Centre in Norwich. The researchers represent a broad spectrum of
expertise from plant biology and systematics to analytical chemistry, genetics
and molecular biology, and drug development from natural products.
More information about the MPC and the resources
provided are available at the following websites:
http://medicinalplantgenomics.msu.edu;
http://metnetdb.org/mpmr_public/.