Have you ever wondered about how most organisms communicate with each other?
OK, maybe not, but stick with me.
I'm not talking about us.
Obviously I'm using my voice to communicate with you right now
but what about trees and plants
or the microbes living in the soil or inside of us?
And let's not forget about organisms at the bottom of the sea.
What words do they use to communicate when they're hungry or in danger sick
or ready to reproduce?
Well they use the oldest form of communication: chemistry.
They use molecules to communicate.
I like to think of molecules as words.
You've seen this form of communication in action before.
Think about ant trails, where ants lead each other to food and then back home again marching
in single file by laying down a pheromone chemical that only they understand.
You could probably come up with many more examples from the natural world where life's
chemistry plays a leading role in the exchange of information.
Our senses of taste, smell, sight, and touch are especially attuned to this language of
chemistry and just like humans have a multitude of spoken languages the same goes for the
language of chemistry spoken across all life.
Unfortunately the chemical language of the natural world is complex and sometimes very
confusing.
While we understand a great deal of it we still have a long way to go.
Nature's been very busy evolving millions of natural chemicals and for the majority
we've yet to learn what they do or even what they look like.
However for those natural chemicals that science has unlocked, wow, they have benefited us
tremendously.
Nature's specialized chemistry feeds us, cures our diseases, and provides many of the building
blocks of our synthetic world.
At the same time nature's chemicals have helped us unlock the inner workings of life processes,
teaching us about our own health and disease.
Imagine if we could more fully understand the chemical language of life and move beyond
just listening to the conversations.
What if we could actually participate in the conversation?
Now that excites me and gives me hope that this new knowledge is key to healing ourselves
and to creating a sustainable future.
From a young age the ocean inspired my passion for science.
As I grew up I began to learn that the organisms that densely inhabit the reefs naturally make
chemicals to protect them from being eaten or overgrown by their neighbors.
I also learned that chemicals from reef animals became drugs to treat cancer or reduce inflammation.
Now that was cool and I wanted to learn more.
Today i am a marine scientist who develops drugs from the sea to treat and understand
human disease.
I guess all that underwater dreaming paid off.
The most accomplished pharmaceutical chemist the world has ever known turns out to be nature.
Unlike scientists in the lab using powerful reagents and extreme conditions to make molecules,
cells in nature use DNA recipes to make molecules in the safe saline environment of a living
cell.
In other words, cells in nature do what humans do in the lab.
Today, through the powerful magnifying lens of genomics, we're rapidly unlocking nature's
chemical secrets and beginning to realize that we have vastly underestimated the staggering
breadth of nature's chemistry.
By some estimates we've only identified a few percent.
Now that's a big deal as lots of the information that's stored in DNA is ultimately used to
create everything in nature.
Genomics has quickly taught us that there's much more to understand at the molecular level
and that it is key to our goal of healing the world and healing ourselves.
The ability to read the genetic code of life or, in science talk, sequence genomes, is
now all around us.
Perhaps you have bought a personal DNA sequencing kit and explored your own genome at home.
That was not remotely possible until just recently, so as you can imagine these are
exciting times for all of us to learn more about ourselves and all life on our planet.
In the laboratory we can quickly recognize huge stretches of DNA sequences that are unique
amongst all life and only found in specific species.
We now know that those unique sequences include the instructions for communication that is
where molecules that function as words are born for millennia humans have used nature's
chemistry to cure disease you might think of penicillin or aspirin.
In my own lab we've used genome sequencing to create an anti-cancer drug.
Over 15 years ago we sequenced the genome of a marine bacterium isolated from ocean
sediments from the Bahamas.
My colleagues here at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography had shown that this microbe
made a potent molecule that was amazingly active against cancer.
Its genome sequence contained over 5 million base pairs of dna including a cluster of over
20 genes never before seen.
We eventually showed, through a series of genetic experiments, that this was responsible
for making the anti-cancer drug.
The advantage of having the genome sequence allowed us to genetically reprogram the cell
and we made new versions of the drug that taught us how it functioned as an anti-cancer
agent.
Today this drug is in advanced Phase 3 clinical trials to treat the aggressive brain cancer
called glioblastoma.
All these years later I still find this potentially life-saving discovery incredible.
The bacteria makes a chemical that tells others not to eat it and now it's treating cancer
patients in hospitals.
How crazy is that?
Today we have sequenced the genomes of thousands of marine microbes to help us look for genes
that produce molecules new to science.
We're not only finding new drug candidates to treat human disease, but we're also learning
about the roles marine molecules play in ocean environments, such as in the health and decline
of coral reef organisms.
These are truly exciting times as the rate of scientific discovery has just exploded
over the last decade.
Equally exciting as well as daunting are multicellular organisms that have genomes hundreds to thousands
of times larger than those of bacteria.
While it was expensive and time consuming to sequence their genomes in the past that's
no longer an issue today.
Quite frankly the latest advances in genome sequencing technology mean that we can read
the genome of nearly any organism.
So what secrets do they hold for us?
A group of organisms that we were fascinated to explore through genomics were animals that
could not move as they must rely on their specialized molecules to navigate their world:
Corals.
Corals are often the most colorful and magnificent creatures on reefs and ocean floors despite
being flashy and perhaps a tempting morsel if you're a fish most soft corals are rarely
eaten or fouled suggesting that they make potent molecules for their own protection
much like plants do on land.
We were astonished when we discovered that this might actually be true.
Do coral chemicals cure cancer as well?
Now that we've discovered their genetic code we're ready to find out right now we're able
to take coral DNA and insert it into laboratory bacteria that can then make the coral molecules.
Our early results have been so promising that we're setting up a new laboratory full of
robotic equipment to accelerate our rate of discovery.
All we need is a small amount of any organism to capture its genetic code for all eternity.
This process not only allows us to tread lightly on our delicate reefs, but also provide new
sustainable technologies to make tomorrow's medicines.
Imagine a cancer-free world.
At Scripps Oceanography, we are now on the precipice of being able to move beyond just
reading the genetic code and towards our ability to write it.
This ability will allow us to decode nature's chemical signals to improve our health through
this technology and nature's chemical language.
We can write our own sustainable future.