Sea of Knowledge

There’s something in the water. A cornucopia of life flourishes within our planet’s oceans, and this hidden world might hold the cure to some of today’s most devastating diseases. Take the recently developed cancer drug, trabectedin: it comes from the humble sea squirt and was discovered during a burst of marine bioprospecting – searching the seas for natural products that might cure human ills. This underwater scavenger hunt has yielded 10,000 products in the last two decades and provided countless avenues for new drug development research. Taq polymerase – a heat-resistant DNA-forming enzyme that is today a crucial lab tool used in DNA analysis techniques – was first found in bacteria crowding around deep-water vents. A tropical sea snail gave the world the popular painkiller ziconotide. The list is ever-growing, and with unknown depths still to be plundered, we might be on the crest of a tidal wave of discoveries.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Originally published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0); MFS
• Research published in PLoS ONE 7(1): e30580