EHPnet: Making Peace with the Environment

Garcinia kola tree, known as "bitter kola," to treat infectious diseases. This treatment has no apparent side effects. In vitro tests of the plant identified 46 biochemical principles that appear to kill bacteria and viruses, including the deadly Ebola virus, the cause of fatal hemorrhagic fever. "The same forest that yields the dreaded Ebola virus could be a source of the cure," said Maurice Iwu, executive director of the nongovernmental Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme in Silver Spring, Maryland. The program studies sustainable uses of tropical forests as alternatives to deforestation and provides management and technical support to development programs in tropical countries. In global bioprospecting, however, identifying a G. kola or certain other medicine-containing species "would be considered lucky 'hits,"' said James Miller, associate curator of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. "Normally, it is a slow, plodding process. The payoff could take 10-15 years to realize, from finding promising compounds in a plant to bringing a medicine to market," he estimated. Miller predictW ed that 1 prospect in 1,000 may contain a novel bioactive compound. Of those, perhaps 1 in 10 or even fewer may lead, directly or indirectly, to new drugs. The numbers, he said, may be a bit more optimistic for dietary supplements. Other research presented at the congress concerned mapping the plant genome. "This story is not yet finished," said Christopher Somerville, the Stanford University-based director of the Department of Plant Biology of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, referring to a large international project that got underway in earnest in 1989 with the task of mapping and sequencing the genes of Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant of the mustard family that has become the white rat of plant researchers. Arabidopsis was chosen because its genome, consisting of about 23,000 genes, is only lightly masked by "junk" DNA (DNA that does not code genes). As of July 1999, 80 million base pairs of an estimated total of 120 million had been sequenced, and completion of the project is expected in December 2000. At the completion of the project, Arabidopsis will be the only plant for which complete structural information is available for all of the genes. Plans are being made for a second phase of the mapping project in which the function of all 23,000 genes will be experimentally determined by 2010. (fe Nl = <JMaking Peace with the_ Environment