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Bottling Nature's Medicine Making Machinery
| Article
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10126 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
2,704 Words |
| Author
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A. Ian Scott
Ian Scott, Fellow of the Royal Society of London, is Davidson
professor of Science and director of the Center for
Biological
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging at Texas A&M University. |
Scientists are learning how to synthesize medicinally valuable biological molecules in a single flask by mixing together a precise set of enzymes and simple molecular building blocks
Since the dawn of civilization man has sought medical drugs from natural sources such as plants and trees. Primitive people around the world have cooked, smoked, beaten, or chewed leaves, roots, bark, berries, or branches of thousands of different plant species in order to treat maladies ranging from malaria, to diarrhea to sprained ankles. In most cases these plant derived treatments work (if they do work) because of one particular molecule (or set of molecules) produced by that plant. Herbal medicines of people around the world, although Western medicine has developed a multitude of medications from nonplant sources.
In the middle of the twentieth century, scientists discovered a new source of medicinally valuable molecules--fungi and microorganisms, which produce many pharmaceuticals, including penicillin and streptomycin.
By studying how naturally produced pharmaceuticals from plants and microorganisms work, chemist have learned how to synthesize in the laboratory many new molecules that mimic the effects of naturally occurring compounds. In addition, for more than 20 years, a broadbased research initiative trying to understand how drugs interact with their natural (human) target molecules, such as proteins and DNA, has been under way. As one part of this initiative, a small group of scientists has concentrated on deciphering the interconnected metabolic pathways through which plants and bacteria synthesize complex molecules. Enzymes, protein molecules that initiate or speed up chemical reactions, define the steps along the metabolic pathways.
Most of the nutrients consumed by cells are used either as sources of energy or as components of replacement molecules for the thousands of different proteins and carbohydrates necessary for cellular metabolism. However, a tiny fraction of the nutrients consumed by plants, fungi, and bacteria is assembled into small, compact, highly specific molecules that in humans may act as vitamins, antibiotics, or even anticancer drugs. Since many of these molecules serve no known purpose for the organism that produces them, the reason for their production remains an unanswered question.
Although human cells cannot make their own vitamins, antibiotics, and drugs, the lower organisms can. Within their genes the lower
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