Crowdsourcing Uncovers New Cancer Cell-Killing Compound
Citizen science has chalked up another successful achievement after playing a significant role in the discovery of an anti-cancer compound. A soil sample sent to University of Oklahoma scientists by a woman from Alaska was found to contain a compound that’s toxic to certain types of cancer cells.
The work is part of a crowdsourcing project set up by the University of Oklahoma to analyse soil samples from across the United States.
One component of drug discovery is screening compounds from biologically and chemically diverse spaces. This requires access to a wide range of sources, too many for a research team to be able to find themselves. It also relies on a lot of travel.
So researchers created the citizen science project and invited people to send in soil samples from their back gardens in an attempt to find medically useful fungal compounds.
Diverse Samples
Robert Cichewicz, one of the project’s founders thought it would be a good idea, not only to build up a library of more diverse samples but also to get the public involved in scientific research.
Once compounds have been isolated from fungi in the soil they are grown in a range of culture conditions to get them to produce many different compounds. These are then tested for their ability to kill bacteria or cancer cells.
Testing Continues
Currently the researchers are testing dozens of compounds. A paper on their efforts – Crowdsourcing Natural Products Discovery to Access Uncharted Dimensions of Fungal Metabolite Diversity – has been published in Angewandte Chemie. You can read the abstract here.
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