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/ Health News / 2007 / September 2007 / September 4, 2007 Thousands of new compounds found inside marine sponges |
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Scientists have discovered thousands of new compounds inside the bodies of marine sponges.
Washington, Sept. 4 : Scientists have discovered thousands of new compounds inside the bodies of marine sponges.
Just as humans have bacteria living in their guts that help them digest the food they eat, over half of the bodyweight of living sea sponges is made up of the many different bacteria that live inside them, said the researchers while presenting their findings at the Society for General Microbiology's 161st Meeting at the University of Edinburgh, UK, which runs from 3-6 September 2007.
"Marine sponges are the most prolific and important source of new active compounds discovered in the last twenty or thirty years in our seas. We thought it likely that many of the interesting new compounds we were discovering inside sea sponges were actually being made by the bacteria inside their bodies, not the sponges themselves", says Dr. Detmer Sipkema of University College Berkeley in California, USA.
The scientists say that it is very difficult to grow these bacteria in the laboratory, as the environment inside a sponge is significantly different from conditions in the surrounding seawater. Only between one in a hundred and one in a thousand types of bacteria can be cultured artificially at present, they say.
"We are trying to culture the other 99 per cent by simulating the microenvironment in the sponge where the bacteria live", says Dr Sipkema.
"The next step will be to identify which bacteria are responsible for the production of the most medically interesting compounds and try to culture these on a larger scale. Most attempts to properly test these important bioactive compounds in hospital patients have failed because doctors simply cannot get enough of the products to prove that the clinical trials are effective or safe," the researcher added.
The scientist have so far achieved success in culturing about 10 per cent of the different sorts of bacteria that live in the sponges.
They believe that successfully culturing the newly discovered, little known bacteria will provide them with new insights into evolution.
"Marine sponges were the first multi-cellular organisms to evolve on earth that are still alive. This implies that the relationship between the sponge and its bacterial inhabitants may also be very old", says Dr Sipkema.
"Therefore sponges are interesting to study the evolution of symbiosis, teaching us about the way different organisms have developed their mutual relationships," Dr. Sipkema added.
ANI
