Prairie plants into antibiotics topic of LC discussion
During Lethbridge College’s Inaugural Applied Research Conference on May 14 Dr. Sophie Kerneis, a Senior Research Scientist in Microbiology, gave a presentation titled ‘Why Alberta Prairie Plants can be used as a source for new antibiotics?’
This presentation, Kerneis said, was given to share the findings of a project that she and a microbial research group are actively working on to discover antibiotic molecules from plants native to Alberta.
Dr. Kerneis said the Microbial Research Group, that it consisted of herself, Leanne DuMontier, Deserae Tailfeathers, Michaela Prozinak, Lane Richardson, Karli Tremel, Chad Beck, Sean Sander, Megan Puchbauer, Ashtin Halmrast, Craig James, and Carlee Ayley. Lethbridge College Botanish, Dr. Steve MacRae; Dr. Roy Golsteyn, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Lethbridge; Dr. Raymond Andersen and Dr. David Williams, who are natural product chemists at UBC, all served as collaborators.Research funding was provided by CARI and Lethbridge College. Dr. Kerneis began her presentation by saying that the goal of her project was and still is to discover new antibiotics from Alberta Prairie Plants in order to continue to cure infectious diseases and to continue in preventing infectious diseases.
Kerneis then talked about how the three leading causes of death in the U.S.A. have evolved over the years; in 1900, the three leading causes of death were pneumonia, tuberculosis, and intestinal infections.
In 1997, the three leading causes of death were heart disease, cancer, and strokes.
Kerneis attributed these changes to the discovery made of how handwashing can prevent disease by Ignaz Semmelweis in 1847. Kerneis said that the Germ Theory of Disease developed by Louis Pasteur in 1880 also helped people understand disease enough to start taking preventative measures.
Dr. Kerneis went on to show a chart that attributed reduction of the crude death rate from infectious diseases to use of vaccines and penicillin from 1990 to 1996. In addition to the data, Dr. Kerneis showed the how different bacteria and fungi could be used to make medicines. An example of this, she said, was Penicillin; it comes from a fungi known as Penicillium chrysogenum. Other examples are Tetracycline and Erythromycin, which come from Steptomyces aureofaciens and Streptomyces erythraeus.
Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the Penicillin in 1928 really changed the way people viewed bacteria and fungi, Kerneis said.
Unfortunately, as antibiotics evolve, so does the bacteria’s ability to resist them. Kerneis briefly touched upon how antibiotic resistant bacteria is becoming more and more of a problem and if nothing is done to combat this increasingly growing issues, approximately 10 million people could die from antibiotic resistant bacteria by 2050. Superbugs, Kerneis added, are bacteria that are not killed by antibiotics and that is already causing a great issue, but has the potential to become an even bigger issue.
Dr. Kerneis then summarized the study ‘Bad Bugs Need a Drug’ that was done by the Infectious Diseases Society of America in 2009 by saying that bacteria are constantly evolving and resisting medicines of the past, so new antibiotics need to be found.
Kerneis emphasized that plants can be and should be used as a source of medicines, as there is an estimated 250,000 to 500,00 species of plants on the early and only a small fraction of the existing plans have actually been investigated. 74 percent of chemotherapeutic agents, Kerneis says, actually come from natural products and their derivatives and the 2015 Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of how natural products can help treat malaria.
To test how and if various plants can be useful as medicines, Kerneis and her research team collected samples in a sustainable way, numbered them, pressed a specimen, identified the plants, dried the plants, separated the different parts, and prepared extracts from each sample. Dr. Kerneis said that 89 extracted from 16 different families were ultimately collected by Lethbridge College and were carefully prepared before being stored in special petri dishes for study.
Various tests were then run on them to see what kind of antibiotic activity they produced.
As a result of the study, Dr. Kerneis said that the college now has a plant extract library of approximately 90 extracts and there are now qualitative and quantitative techniques available to screen plant extracts for their antibiotic activities.
Out of the 20 extracts tested, eight were found to inhibit the growth of Staphylococcus, four were found to inhibit the growth of Acinetobacter, extracts with MIC went as low as 15 micrograms per millilitre. Two antibiotic molecules were also isolated from one active extract.
Dr. Kerneis concluded that this study may be the solution to continue the cure of infectious diseases, to continue the prevention of infectious diseases, to continue food production, and to continue to improve the quality of common objects.