List of nature centers in Kentucky

Transcription

VO: Could coal fires or subterranean rocks yield tomorrow's cancer drugs? Maybe, says UK pharmaceutical researcher Jon Thorson. He's looking for natural products in Kentucky's unique environments. Jon Thorson: Natural products they're basically molecules that have evolved for function over time and historically they have probably been found most in the areas of cancer and infectious disease. You can make very minor changes to molecules that we already know, and that can lead to very dramatic changes in the potency, the way that the molecules behave in the body. A lot of these structures are very complex, and so to approach them from a traditional synthetic strategy is a very lengthy and difficult process. So if you can instead manipulate the natural machinery that generates these molecules, it may provide a really rapid way to do medicinal chemistry. In terms of novel scaffolds, since that's sort of more the Holy Grail, that's where we feel you may have a leg up if you're starting with unusual organisms and things that people have not investigated before. VO: Thorson is partnering with Jim Hower at the Center for Applied Energy Research to get samples from underground coal fires. Jon Thorson: Jim studies basically underground coal fires and the emissions from these underground coal fires. Jim Hower: In February of 2012 John dropped me an email and described what he was doing, and it basically asked if I was interested in participating. And I invited him out to my laboratory at CAER. We talked about the types of places that I would go, and mutually we decided that the coal fire sites were a very good starting point, because they are fairly unique. Everywhere there's coal you have that potential because coal will burn. The ones in Eastern Kentucky, we tend to believe got started by way of forest fires, or fires started by lightning strikes. And then once they're started, particularly when they're in these abandoned mines, there are so many access points for air. We just cannot feasibly plug up all the holes, basically just wait until the coal runs out. The Lotts Creek Fire, this was first reported late in 2011, so we made a couple of visits to do our gas sampling in 2012. Made another visit with John to collect samples for the Pharmacy study. Sites really vary considerably from visit to visit because they're very dynamic location. Obviously if things are on fire underground you could have, they're burning through maybe old coal pillars, which then once they're burned out are going to collapse. Fire kills the tree roots and other plants so we have trees falling and certainly going to change the runoff there, which could definitely affect people downhill and down the valley from these places. Really any place around that vent, that's been heated whether it's soil or some of the minerals that have been volatilized and come out of the gases condensed out, either on a rock surface or tree roots...is really a prime target for sampling. Jon Thorson: And then Jim has helped facilitate connections with some of the mining operations in the Commonwealth and also put us in touch with the KGS, which is one of our most recent collection sites in a core drilling operation. VO: In April 2013, the Kentucky Geological Survey drilled a 4,800-foot deep well--in the Eastern Kentucky Coal Field--to analyze the potential of underground rocks to hold carbon dioxide. More than 40 rock samples from multiple depths were taken and sent to Thorson. VO: At the Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation, Thorson's team takes a small sample, puts it on a media plate, purifies it, and looks for unique molecules. Jon Thorson: a lot of these organisms are very slow-growing organisms and so you're talking months to get you to a point to where you're finally getting extracts and start to look at the profile. At that point you can at least prioritize you cultures based on chemical novelty. The final step is to put them in a repository that is made available to investigators on the UK campus so that they can access them and enter them into some of their studies. Our program has only been in place for a little over a year but we have had a fair bit of success already. The 60 compounds in our repository have all come from microbes that were found in the Commonwealth. My lab has developed a number of different technologies for taking a natural product and further diversifying, using enzymes, so we can take one molecule and sort of blow it up into a larger array of structures. Natural products have been and continue to be a driving force in drug discovery. And the hope would be that, you know, some of these would eventually come out of the coal mines here in the Commonwealth.