Date
July 28, 2003
Date
Berkeley Lab Science Beat Berkeley Lab Science Beat
Return to Kamchatka, part 2
 
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Doing the job right


As the first step in filing a new Thrust 2 application with IPP, Torok found an eager U.S. industry partner in the Diversa Corporation of San Diego. Diversa is a pioneer in applying genomic technologies to discover and develop the products of microbial genes into medical, agricultural, chemical, and industrial products.

Once again Vector, now known as the State Research Center for Biotechnology and Virology, will take the lead among the Russian partners. Not only has Torok built a strong working relationship with Vector over the years, but, he notes dryly, "a certain percent of scientists must have a 'shady past' to qualify" for an IPP project.

Joining Vector is the Center for Ecological Research and Bioresources Development in Puschino, near Moscow, which Torok describes as "one of IPP's success stories. DOE helped start it, and it was one of the first institutions in Russia to obtain nonprofit status. It has the legal status to ship biological samples out of Russia, which greatly simplifies the usual bureaucratic process of overlapping permits."

The geysers and mudpots of Kamchatka's Uzon Caldera and Valley of Geysers (top) are home to a myriad of microbial extremophiles.

The final, vital partner is the Institute of Volcanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "Gennadii Karpov, the Institute's deputy director, has studied the volcanoes there for 35 years," says Torok. "Nobody knows the region better."

One challenge facing the project is providing laboratory facilities in the field. Torok explains: "If you have organisms in a hot spring that can't exist below 85 degrees C, you can't move them far before they die. You have to have a lab for basic microbiology activities on the spot."

  A hut in the Valley of Geysers, one of the few structures in the preserve.

The Institute of Volcanology has a dilapidated, weather-struck old building in the region that might be upgraded, but arrangements will have to be made diplomatically. Torok suggests that "if Canada, say, came into Yellowstone and wanted to build a microbiology field lab there, we might not be all that enthusiastic about it."

Financial arrangements for the project will support several expeditions over the next two years. The first trip is scheduled to return to Kamchatka in the spring of 2004, spending one week in the Valley of Geysers and another in Uzon Caldera.

Diversa will apply unique methods of extracting genetic material from samples in the field, without the need to grow microbes in laboratory cultures. Diversa's cofounder and science director Eric Mathur and two molecular biologists will train the Vector team members, including Repin and others, to use these proprietary techniques and instruments to extract DNA from diverse communities of organisms.

Also along will be microbiologist Vera Dmitrieva, executive director of the Center for Ecological Research and Bioresources Development, and Gennadii Karpov of the Institute of Volcanology. After the foreign visitors leave, the Russian team members will continue to collect, extract DNA, and send products to Diversa.

On this trip, DOE and Berkeley Lab will again be represented by Torok and Dahlbacka. Reporters and photographers from USA Today and National Geographic have also been invited as guests of Diversa. As usual, armed rangers will be on hand to ward off the bears.

Into the future

Kamchatka has been open to Western visitors only a dozen years; bioprospecting initiatives are still gathering steam. Two years ago, Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University organized a Yellowstone workshop, sponsored by the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation and hosted by the lieutenant governor of Kamchatka. The conference brought together Kamchatkans and extremophile experts from all over the world, including Japan and Europe, and from DOE, NASA, the National Science Foundation, U.S. companies, universities, and foundations as well. It was the beginning of a movement to insure that Kamchatka remains a prime bioprospecting site.

Beyond Russia and the vast expanses of Siberia, other former republics of the USSR are actively seeking partnerships to prospect for potentially useful microbes. Across the former empire's breadth there are many spectacular pristine environments -- plus plenty of spectacularly contaminated ones. Uzbekistan's deserts; 17,000-foot peaks in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia; gruesome Vozrozhdeniya Island in the middle of the fast-evaporating Aral Sea, long used to isolate bioweapons experiments and waste but now connected to dry land; nuclear test sites in the steppes of Kazakhstan: these are the kinds of places extremophiles love.

In these uniquely challenging environments, as in the volcanic landscape of Kamchatka, lurk undiscovered microbes of the kind Tamas Torok finds most fascinating: hardy and resilient beyond imagining but potentially useful as well. Their fragile versatility offers a bridge between old enemies now struggling to find ways to be partners and friends.

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