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Seeking a solution to a billion-dollar crop
problem
An AFMNet team is developing technology
to use peptides to boost plants' immunity
In just over a year, researchers have developed a method
for making large number of peptides for use in everything
from pharmaceutical to additives to prevent food spoilage.
Around the world, bacteria and fungi cause billions of dollars
worth of crop losses every year, with more than 25% of plant
food production lost to microbial diseases.
University of British Columbia researcher Dr. Robert
Hancock and his Advanced Food and Materials Network (AFMNet)
colleagues are tackling the global problem with peptides –
protein fragments with powerful antimicrobial properties.
Essentially, it works like this: By taking genes –
which express proteins – that occur naturally in a plant's
defence system and supplementing them with the disease-fighting
peptides, the plants can become more resistant to diseases
that attack them.
Dr. Hancock's approach involves a new method of making
large numbers of peptides with altered sequences of amino
acids and screening the resulting "peptide arrays"
for good antimicrobial activity. This is allowing highly effective,
small peptide antibiotics to be made that could be used in
everything from pharmaceuticals to additives that inhibit
food spoilage.
"This process has allowed us to make an effective peptide
that is only eight amino acids long," Dr. Hancock
says, "which would mean it's the smallest peptide ever
documented with considerable activity."
Dr. Hancock and his colleagues are making significant progress:
After only one year in operation, they have developed two
technologies and applied for patents for them. As well, Dr. Hancock's
research is being published in the prestigious journal Nature
Biotechnology.
"This is a lot of success to realize after just one
year of collaboration," says Dr. Allan Paulson, Associate
Scientific Director of AFMNet. "The team made quite a
presentation at our annual meeting."
Dr. Hancock's project partner, Dr. Santosh Misra, a
professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology
from the University of Victoria, has been working on the plant
side of the research, trying to help plants fight off disease.
Already, she has produced a peptide with the aid of a wound
inducible expression system – a gene that is expressed
by the occurrence of a wound – from poplar trees that
will fight off Fusarium, a common fungal contaminant and a
well-known plant pathogen that may cause various infections
in humans.
While Drs. Hancock and Misra were both involved in the Canadian
Bacterial Diseases Network (CBDN), which successfully completed
its last year of eligible funding, it was the creation of
AFMNet that made this project possible. In particular, Dr.
Hancock would not have considered the possibility of using
peptides as food additives.
"My research with CBDN has definitely helped us to rapidly
develop this technology and patent application, but this project
is entirely novel to AFMNet," says Dr. Hancock.
"The network supported a productive collaboration with
Santosh, as well as much-needed trainees."
The two industry partners on this project, SynGene Biotek
Inc of Victoria, which Dr. Misra founded in 1996, and
Inimex Pharmaceuticals, Inc, of Vancouver, which Dr. Hancock
founded, provide a potential commercial outlet for the team's
research.
Without the formation of AFMNet, the likelihood of industry
partnerships would be slim, he says. Dr. Hancock also
credits AFMNet funding for bringing postdoctoral fellow Dr. Kai
Hilpert into his lab. Dr. Hilpert brought in the peptide
array technology.
"We would not have started to try to make small, effective
peptides without the funding from AFMNet and the NCE rationale
– networking, development of intellectual property for
building Canadian companies, and training of young researchers
– and without the collaboration of Santosh's lab that
provided a potential route to plant production of these peptides,"
says Dr. Hancock.
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