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CONTRIBUTED Weng Ruh Wong developed BioMAP.

SANTA CRUZ -- UC Santa Cruz researchers have a new tool to help them prospect for antibiotic gold in deep-sea sediments. They're using a new technique called BioMAP to speed sort through potential natural compounds and check them against known antibiotics so they can pick out the nuggets that are novel and have antibiotic properties.

The development of new kinds of antibiotics has slowed to a trickle in recent decades, but antibiotic-resistant bacteria are on the rise. This squeezes the capacity of current antibiotics to fight infections. Public health officials worry about a devastating antibiotic crisis if the situation doesn't change soon.

"There's a real need to think about new ways we can find drugs which are fundamentally different from the existing panel of drugs," said Roger Linington, chemistry professor at UCSC.

Bacteria are abundant in our environment, especially in soil. Linington's team focuses on bacteria found in sea floor sediments, many from the Monterey Bay. It's a perfect place to look for antibiotics because bacteria are crowded and fighting ferociously for food and other resources. In fact, 80 percent of drugs approved by the FDA are derived from natural products.

"If you are a bacterium that makes a compound that kills your competitors, it puts you at an evolutionary advantage," Linington said.


The problem is that most bacteria use a handful of compounds for their chemical warfare, most of which are already being used as antibiotics. The challenge, Linington said, was finding undiscovered drugs. BioMAP speeds that process exponentially.

Linington's team used the UCSC Chemical Screening Center's liquid handling robots for the manual labor of extracting, mixing and diluting the thousands of compounds they studied. "If somebody did it by hand, it would take an impossibly long amount of time," Linington said.

Researcher Weng Ruh Wong developed BioMAP, working in Linington's laboratory. She is visiting UCSC from Malaysia on a grant from QB3-Malaysia, a collaboration between the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences and the Malaysian government.

UCSC is one of three UC colleges in the collaboration. Wong and her team reported the initial findings last week in the scientific journal Chemistry and Biology.

They used 72 known antibiotics panel of disease-causing bacteria to create a detailed profile of how the antibiotics did their damage. They then tested this profile against a batch of 3,000 compounds from UCSC's natural products library to see how they compared with known antibiotics. Most that had antibiotic properties were similar to known drugs, but they found a new previously unknown compound, arromycin.

It won't make for a good antibiotic because it has too many side effects, but it shows that BioMAP is capable of finding candidates for new drugs.

Linington said he hopes to have the first batch of compounds to study in detail in about two to three years, but anything they find will take another 15 years of refining and testing before it gets to your neighborhood pharmacy. For now, his lab is focusing on the initial steps of drug discovery. "We are a feeding ground for new ideas for drug development programs," Linington said.