MabCent: Arctic marine bioprospecting in Norway

Johan Svenson

doi:10.1007/s11101-012-9239-3

Abstract

The deep waters surrounding the coastline of the northern parts of Norway represent an exciting biotope for marine exploration. Dark and cold Arctic water generates a hostile environment where the ability to adapt is crucial to survival. These waters are nonetheless bountiful and a diverse plethora of marine organisms thrive in these extreme conditions, many with the help of specialised chemical compounds. In comparison to warmer, perhaps more inviting shallower tropical waters, the Arctic region has not been as thoroughly investigated. MabCent is a Norwegian initiative based in Tromsø that aims to change this. Since 2007, scientists within MabCent have focussed their efforts on the study of marine organisms inhabiting the Arctic waters with the long term goal of novel drug discovery and development. The activities of MabCent are diverse and range from sampling the Arctic ice shelf to the chemical synthesis of promising secondary metabolites discovered during the screening process. The current review will present the MabCent pipeline from isolation to identification of new bioactive marine compounds via an extensive screening process. An overview of the main activities will be given with particular focus on isolation strategies, bioactivity screening and structure determination. Pitfalls, hard earned lessons and the results so far are also discussed.

Highlights

With one of the longest coastlines in the world it is not surprising that Norway is a country with a rich history in both marine exploration and exploitation
A change from an initial 40 fraction HPLC fractionation to an early flash chromatographic separation and a proper dose–response analysis of the active hits reduced those numbers to satisfactory levels
One of the most challenging issues is, despite the geographical placement of MabCent, access to sufficient amount of biological material and subsequently pure compounds. This is a universal challenge for any marine bioprospecting endeavour, perhaps best illustrated by the 18 grams of bryostatin-1 needed for preclinical and clinical studies in 1991 which was isolated from approximately 12.6 metric tonnes of wet organism over a period of 10 months (Schaufelberger et al 1991)

Summary

Introduction

With one of the longest coastlines in the world it is not surprising that Norway is a country with a rich history in both marine exploration and exploitation. The centre for research based innovation has been focussed on studying Arctic marine organisms as these represent a group of organisms that have not been well studied and have the potential to display interesting biochemistries due their adaption to living conditions near, and below the freezing point of water (Fig. 2).

Results

Conclusion