Found: Small Blob with Big Potential
Null Editor, Hayley Birch, talks to Bob Moore about the surprise discovery he made among the corals of the Great Barrier Reef.
There are, in science, just a handful of subjects that steal all the limelight. As a researcher, you have to be resigned to the fact that unless you’ve found a cure for cancer or designed a time machine, there’s a good chance nobody’s going to be interested. Even when you think you’ve found something exciting, it can be years before anyone takes any notice - particularly if the subject of your investigations happens to be a small brown blob.
Fortunately for biologist Bob Moore, the seven years he spent staring at dishes full of brown blobs called protists finally paid off. Quite inadvertently, Moore has discovered something that may remove a major obstacle standing in the path of researchers trying to treat malaria.It all began as a diversion from his thesis studies. Moore was studying sex, albeit it in – you’ve guessed it – brown blobs, or zooxanthellae, tiny single-celled creatures that live in coral. But there were a few large, unidentified objects floating around in his samples, so he enlisted the help of an expert. 'I went to Paddy,' says Moore, referring to the University of Sydney’s legendary protist specialist, David Patterson. 'You can take anything to him and he’ll tell you what it is.'
Paddy took a long, hard look at the mysterious sample, and then did something Moore didn’t expect. 'He took it out of my hand, put it on his top-of-the-range microscope – and squished it,' says Moore. Paddy’s instincts were right – out of the strange objects came what Moore calls 'these wriggly fellas'. But even Paddy, in his infinite wisdom, couldn’t say exactly what the wriggly fellas were. Moore was sent home without an answer.
Several years and a bunch of genetic tests later, however, it turned out he and his partner at the bench, Miroslav Obornik, had discovered a new type of organism altogether. An organism that would plug a huge gap in evolutionary biologists’ knowledge of parasites, and one parasite in particular – the malaria bug, Plasmodium, carried by mosquitoes. Moore was suddenly heading an international research effort.
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Moore’s new protist, however, is up to the task. As well as being closely related enough to the malaria bug to act as a research stand-in, it can be easily and cheaply grown in the lab, outside of any animal host, or its cells. And of equal value is the role that Moore’s blob, christened Chromera velia, could play in raising the profile of protists. 'This might be the one organism that starts to get protists noticed,' he says.
Not exactly renowned for their cute ‘n’ cuddliness, protists have never quite managed to grab the attention of the world’s media. Now, at last, they may have a fighting chance. But “pushing the envelope” on this one has sapped every ounce of Moore’s strength. 'It’s been like drowning with a baby. And you want this baby to get to shore and you struggle and struggle, and you get to the shore. Then you hand over the baby and find you’ve got no energy left for yourself.'
So has Moore been left with anything to show for his perseverance? Scientific acclaim? A place in the history books? 'You just do your best in the hope that one day you’ll get some kind of reward. And you’ve got no idea. My wife said yesterday, "The paper’s been out for two days. Where’s the reward?” I’m still waiting!'
Moore's reward will come, but in the form of research support. Even before his paper published in Nature last week he had institutions ready and waiting to write out cheques. ’By the day everyone was holding the paper in their hands, there were already offers on the table to contribute ten and twenty thousand dollars each to a genome
project.’ Which could mean we’ll have a fully sequenced genome before the year is out – the next logical step if Chromera velia is to yield any useful drugs.Fifteen authors contributed to the original paper, which you can find here.
More from Hayley on her page.
A veritable feast of bugs:
- Veggie bugs - Sprouts are bad for bugs
- Rampant bugs - Superbugs superbuggered
- Bat bugs - Transexual bug's sick sex
- Pavlov's bugs - Cockroaches drool over sugar
Main image kindly supplied by Kirsten Heimann at the
North Queensland Algal Identification/Culturing
Facility at James Cook University, Australia.
Malarial parasite: W
Coral with zooxanthellae (pop-up): COFC
North Queensland Algal Identification/Culturing
Facility at James Cook University, Australia.
Malarial parasite: W
Coral with zooxanthellae (pop-up): COFC
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