New light on medicinal benefits of plants

The resources, to be released on Thursday, follow a $6 million initiative to study how plant genes contribute to producing various chemical compounds, some of which are medicinally important.

“Our major goal has been to capture the genetic blueprints of medicinal plants for the advancement of drug discovery and development,” said Joe Chappell, professor of plant biochemistry in the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture and coordinator for the Medicinal Plant Consortium (MPC).

Project partner Dr Sarah O'Connor at the John Innes Centre will now work with her research group towards the first full genetic sequence of a medicinal plant and will also experiment with combining beneficial properties from different plants to create the first new-to-nature compounds derived from plants. A priority focus will be compounds with anticancer activity.

“Fewer and fewer new drugs have been successfully making it to the marketplace over the last 10 years, in large part because of a reliance on chemical synthesis for making new chemicals,” said Chappell.

“Somehow in our fast-track lives, we forgot to take advantage of the lessons provided by Mother Nature. That is all changing now with the recognition that two-thirds of all currently prescribed drugs can be traced back to natural sources and the development of resources such as those in the MPC to facilitate new drug discovery activities.”

Some well-known medicines have come from plants. The once ubiquitous foxglove gives us the cardiac muscle stimulant digoxin. The periwinkle plant offers a source for the widely used chemotherapy drugs vincristine and vinblastine. These and many other medicinal plants, often commonly found in household gardens and flower boxes, harbour a wealth of compounds ripe for medicinal applications.

“Just as the sensory properties of plants interact with and trigger your sense of smell, plants' natural compounds can target and cause a reaction within your body. This gives them tremendous pharmaceutical potential,” said Chappell.

During this two-year project researchers set out to develop a collection of data that would aid in understanding how plants make chemicals, a process called biosynthesis. This knowledge ultimately could make it possible to engineer plants to produce larger quantities of medicinally useful compounds as well as different versions with other therapeutic potential.

To develop the resources, the researchers studied the genes and chemical profiles of 14 plants known for medicinal properties or compounds with biological activity. These included plants such as foxglove, ginseng, and periwinkle. The findings will help researchers discover how nature's chemical diversity is created and enable them to uncover new drug candidates or increase the efficacy of existing ones.

“The current understanding of molecules and genes involved in the formation of beneficial compounds is very incomplete,” said O'Connor, who is also a lecturer in chemical sciences at University of East Anglia.

“However, the ability to conduct genome-wide studies of model plant species has resulted in an explosive increase in our knowledge of and capacity to understand how genes control biological processes and chemical composition”.

The MPC project includes participants from the University of Kentucky, Michigan State University, Iowa State University, the University of Mississippi, Purdue University, Texas A&M University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John Innes Centre in Norwich. The researchers represent a broad spectrum of expertise from plant biology and systematics to analytical chemistry, genetics and molecular biology, and drug development from natural products.

More information about the MPC and the resources provided are available at the following websites: http://medicinalplantgenomics.msu.edu; http://metnetdb.org/mpmr_public/.

Contacts

JIC Press Office
Zoe Dunford, Tel: 01603 255111, email: zoe.dunford@nbi.ac.uk
Andrew Chapple, Tel: 01603 251490, email: andrew.chapple@nbi.ac.uk
University of Kentucky press office
Carl Nathe, (859) 257-3200; carl.nathe@uky.edu
Photo available:
Periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus), a source of potent chemotherapeutic drugs and a common horticultural plant found around the world.
Funding
Funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA

About the John Innes Centre:

The John Innes Centre, www.jic.ac.uk, is a world-leading research centre based on the Norwich Research Park www.nrp.org.uk. The JIC's mission is to generate knowledge of plants and microbes through innovative research, to train scientists for the future, and to apply its knowledge to benefit agriculture, human health and well-being, and the environment. JIC delivers world class bioscience outcomes leading to wealth and job creation, and generating high returns for the UK economy. JIC is one of eight institutes that receive strategic funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and received a total of £28.4M investment in 2010-11.