In this edition:
 |
News From the Deane |
|
 |
Bees: the buzz word in antibiotic development |
|
 |
Opportunities |
|
 |
Events |
|
 |
Snippets | |
 |
Science News Archive | |
News from the Dean |
|
Dear Colleagues, Thank you to all who worked to get our grades successfully through Senate last week. As many people have been away at conferences for the past couple of weeks it has been pretty quiet! However a couple of items of note: 1. Registration is now available for the National UniServe Nominations for Conference to be held from 26 to 28 September. All details available at: http://science.uniserve.edu.au 2. Nominations for 'Young Tall Poppies' - 28-40 years and maximum 10 years post-doc experience. The criteria are excellence in academic achievement and community engagement. We were pretty successful last year with both Kirstie Fryirs and Nathan Daczko winning an award. Details at www.aips.net.au/tallpoppies/awards/2007 3. An opportunity for our students to undertake vacation employment at Cobar mines in Central Western NSW. Projects include - environmental monitoring; management plans for weeds and waste; trials for tailings dam rehabilitation. This would be most beneficial for students at end of second or third year. Pay is around $25 per hour. For details contact Tanya Huon, Environmental Officer, CMPL - CSA Mine. Phone 02 6836 5142; 0427 064 469 or email thuon@cmps.com.au Finally, congratulations again to Belinda Ferrari and her tame environmental bugs - once again getting good press in the Sydney Morning Herald! Till next week, |
 |
_________________________________________________________
Bees – the buzz word in new antibiotic development
|
|
With infectious diseases caused by drug-resistant bacteria accounting for millions of premature deaths worldwide every year, experts agree that one of the most urgent missions of medical research is to locate and develop novel antibiotics. At the forefront of this quest is a group from Macquarie University, whose groundbreaking research looks set to revolutionise bioprospecting approaches to antibiotic development. Bioprospecting – the search for substances that are produced by living organisms which may be of medicinal value – has been employed by pharmaceutical companies for many years as one avenue for the discovery of novel drugs, especially antibiotics. While it has revealed itself to be a very useful approach in the hunt for new antibiotics, bioprospecting has recently fallen out of favour – not because it is an unsound approach, but because the principal method employed by most pharmaceutical companies is proving to be ineffective in sourcing novel antibiotics that can take on the world’s newest and deadliest bacteria. As ecologists and evolutionary biologists Macquarie’s Dr Adam Stow, Professor Andrew Beattie, Professor David Briscoe, Associate Professor Michael Gillings, Marita Holley, Shannon Smith, Tish Silberbauer and Christine Turnbull were keenly aware of the potential of bioprospecting and believed they could develop an approach with a high probability of success. “The problem the pharmaceutical companies have had is that they have relied on a very simple approach to bioprospecting,” explains Beattie, Director of Macquarie’s Key Centre for Biodiversity and Bioresources. “The natural product screening approach, which involves collecting as many species as possible from areas such as rainforests or coral reefs and then screening them for antibacterial activity back in the lab, is very hit and miss because it lacks a clear focus. For this reason most of the big pharmaceutical companies have moved away from bioprospecting. “Although many scientists consider ecologists and evolutionary biologists as being on the left-wing of science we believe that we are actually at the cutting edge of pharmaceutical research because we know how to find the places where antibiotics are most likely to be. Our approach offers, for the first time, some real science in the business of bioprospecting for new antibiotics.” While large numbers of antibiotics in current use have been derived from soil microbes, the new research from Macquarie strongly suggests that insects are the key to developing the stronger and more diverse antibiotics which are urgently required to fight against today’s increasingly resistant bacteria, and that it will be social insects rather than solitary ones that hold the answers. “The fight against disease is becoming critical because many pathogens have evolved resistance not only to one antibiotic, but to most of them,” says Beattie. “The pharmaceutical companies are modifying products they have been using for decades but what they badly need are entirely new compounds, unrelated to those in current use, so that the microbes are faced with a new set of antibiotics that they haven’t previously encountered. This is why what we are doing – offering a totally novel approach – is so important. We believe that the sorts of animals we are looking at have been solving their problems in very different ways.” Insect societies by their very nature provide ideal conditions for the spread of contagious disease. Typified by crowding and often by low genetic variation, disease transmission within such colonies has the potential to be rampant. So to survive their high-density colonial living, social insects have had to evolve effective methods to halt the spread of disease and the most common mechanism they employ is antimicrobial secretions which are particularly important primary barriers to infection. Social insects, such as bees, hold the key to developing the stronger and more diverse antibiotics which are urgently required to fight against today’s increasingly resistant bacteria. Led by Stow from the Department of Biological Sciences, the Macquarie team tested the hypothesis that a stronger antimicrobial would indeed be produced in a large, closely-related colony, and found that increases in group size and genetic relatedness were strongly correlated with increasing antimicrobial strength, suggesting that resistance to disease has most probably been a major contribution to the evolutionary success of insects. The team used bees for the study because the species offers a step in sociality, from solitary through semi-social to highly, eusocial colonies. After selecting bees from two sub-families and three tribes, they assayed cuticular antimicrobial secretions from the bees along a gradient of sociality, against Staphylococcus aureus (golden staph). “We considered that perhaps as a prerequisite to the evolution of sociality the antimicrobial compounds that insects secrete would need to have evolved as a primary barrier to defence,” explains Stow. “What we discovered was that the antimicrobials of even the most primitive semi-social species were an order of magnitude stronger that those of solitary species, and that the strongest antimicrobial was present on the surface of the bees from the largest colony and the highest level of relatedness, suggesting a point of no return beyond which disease control was essential. Our results suggest that selection by microbial pathogens was critical to the evolution of sociality and required the production of strong, front-line antimicrobial defences.” The group now intends to extend the study to invertebrates such as wasps and thrips in order to determine if what they have discovered in bees exists in other groups. In addition to the significant implications this research has for the development of new antibiotics, the research project produced a second important discovery. Two of the team – Gillings and Briscoe – have designed a novel miniaturised detection system that is able to assay antimicrobials from the tiniest of specimens. This new technology has the potential to revolutionise how experiments of this nature are conducted. Details of the study were recently featured in the Royal Society publication Biology Letters in an article titled Antimocrobial defences increase with sociality of bees. Email the researcher: andrew.beattie@mq.edu.au This story adapted from a story by Fiona Crawford appearing in the June edition of Macquarie News
|
|
|
_________________________________________________________ Story TwoStory Two |
|
Story Two
|
|
|
_________________________________________________________
Opportunities |
|
_________________________________________________________ EDUCATION OFFICER - CSIRO Salary $46,600 to $59,309 The CSIRO is seeking an energetic and motivated Education Officer to join the team at the CSIRO Science Education Centre in North Ryde. You will have strong communication and presentation skills. A teaching qualification and/or experience in science communication would be expected. You will also need to have a good knowledge of science and a passion for working with children. One full time position and two part time positions are available immediately. Some weekend work and regional travel will be required. Position description and selection criteria are available from Darren Vogrig on (02) 9490 8481 or email darren.vogrig@csiro.au Applications close Friday 20 July 2007
_________________________________________________________ Another Science Writing Course. Biotext, a science information consultancy based in Canberra, Brisbane and Melbourne, will be offering a training course - Successful science writing, editing and publication management - in various locations in 2007.
The training section of the Biotext website has a link to a detailed outline of the course. The cost is $700 + GST for the two-day course; this includes comprehensive course notes, lunches and morning and afternoon tea. A discount of 10% applies to anyone in full-time study.
_________________________________________________________
|
|
Events |
|
_________________________________________________________ "Live Green" City of Sydney Sustainability Expo One for the diary...Come do your green shopping while listening to green talks, drinking from the green bar and learning some green cooking techniques... The City of Sydney Green Living Expo will be held at Victoria Park, corner of City Rd and Broadway, Camperdown, Saturday 25 August, 10am - 4pm.
_________________________________________________________ Help Green the Park of Sydney While we're on the topic of green... The Rozelle Bay Community Native Nursery is a volunteer communiy group reintroducing local plant species to the local area. You can help by participating in nursery projects such as collecting and propogating native seeds, weeding and planting. New volunteers are always welcome, no special skills are required. More information at: http://www.ramin.com.au/annandale/rbcnn.shtml
_________________________________________________________
ELS Seminar Series Departments in ELS host seminars covering a wide range of topics associated with ongoing research projects and other areas of interest. The seminars are delivered by academics, research staff, and students from within the Division, as well as guest speakers from other institutions and industry. Details of times, dates, locations and topics of seminars to be held over the next few weeks are listed here.
_________________________________________________________
|
|
SnippetsUnity on the dance floor CO2 turns reefs soft Viagra can't erect mens' self esteem Indigenous governance is realistic Teaching bullying a lesson Breeding new hope for tea tree oil Ice 'factories' under climate crunch Lost forests found below Greenland Decontamination of Tilligerry Creek |
|
__________________________________________
|
|