King Abdullah University of Science and Technology at Thuwal, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
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January 2011 / Muharram 1432 Issue No. 5
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Winter Enrichment Program 2011
www.kaust.edu.sa
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Top left: A detail the inner mesh that makes up a sponge. Main: A Red Sea Sponge.
Commencement December 16 marked the first commencement at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, attended by nearly 300 master’s degree candidates, many culminating some 16 months of dedicated study. “Today’s celebration is one of historic significance as the world’s youngest and most ambitious university graduates its first class… an occasion of bold aspiration and remarkable accomplishment. We salute the vision, generosity and unflagging support that our founder, King Abdullah, has given us in this venture,” said KAUST trustee Frank Rhodes in his commencement speech.
Red Sea Sponges قام الدكتور فراس اليف و هو أحد الباحثني يف خمترب البحر األمحر لبيولوجيا األنظمة املتكاملة يف جامعة امللك عبد اهلل للعلوم والتقنية بكتابة حبثه .العلمي الذي ناقش فيه املجتمعات امليكروبية غري العادية واملتواجدة يف اسفنج البحر األمحر
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KCC Opening and Symposium The KAUST Catalysis Center (KCC) opened on December 6 with over 120 international delegates in attendance. The combination of its interdisciplinary state-of-the-art laboratories and contiguous core facilities was the envy of many of the visiting researchers. “The center is probably the best in the world… superbly equipped,” said Professor Herbert Roesky from Goettingen, “and this has been a wonderful high-level meeting.” Professor Kazunari Domen looks forward to a dynamic relationship and the exchange of postdocs working in the field between KAUST and the University of Tokyo.
Dr. Feras Lafi, a scientist in the Red Sea Laboratory of Integrative Systems Biology, has been investigating the unusual microbial communities in Red Sea sponges. This is the first time that there has been research access to these extraordinary sea creatures from the coast of Saudi Arabia, and the initial results suggest that the sponges are of significant interest to the scientific community. As part of the KAUST Global Collaborative Research (GCR) program, Dr. Lafi and his GCR partners recently published an article in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal (part of the Nature Publishing Group) regarding the sequencing of the microbial communities of several sponge species from the Red Sea. This builds on Dr. Lafi’s Ph.D. thesis on poribacteria, a sponge specific phylum, at the University of Queensland in northeastern Australia. Marine sponges are one of the oldest life forms on the planet, dating back some 600 million years and possibly much longer; in some places they may occupy most of the available surfaces on the coral reef or the seabed. These multicellular animals have a simple body plan and their tissues show little differentiation or
coordination. Fixed in one place by a stalk or by settling in various underwater objects, sponges filter seawater through their pores, extract bacteria and use them as a food source, releasing the filtered water via the osculum (the exhalent opening, see fig.1) at the rate of up to 24,000L/day per 1-kg of sponge. The Red Sea, the warm and high saline body of water abutting the KAUST campus, is a largely unexplored marine ecosystem. Its coral reefs, some 2000km in length, nourish over 200 recorded species of sponge, yet few of these have ever been studied. In the study described, the sponges, their microbial communities and the surrounding seawater were all examined using genetic sequencing techniques. W h a t m a ke s t h e s e s p o n g e microbe associations so intriguing to researchers? The soft sponges being examined cannot rely on their hard shell for protection, but rather on their chemical arsenal to survive attacks. Over millions of years of evolution, these sponges, delicate as they may appear, have developed a strong chemical defense system to protect themselves from predators. Their evident success, witnessed by
their continuing existence, may also be due to their relationship with their microbial symbionts, common ancestors for the more familiar microbes of today. Recent studies showed that a considerable percentage of these chemicals originate from the microbial community residing in the sponge tissue. It is well known that these diverse microorganisms can constitute over half of the volume of a sponge, but their association with their host remains a puzzle. We do know that different microbes can be sources of food, pathogens, parasites or mutualistic symbionts. Symbiotic microbes need to be able to compete with other microbes present in the water in order to colonize the sponge and to do so, they have evolved to produce an array of different chemicals that are able, for example, to stop the cell cycle of competing microbe species. Such compounds may achieve this by interfering with the cell cycle of the cancer cell (these chemicals may have anti-cancer properties) or by selectively killing other species (these chemicals may have anti-microbial peptides or antibiotic properties). It is the biotechnological potential of sponge-microbe associations
that fuels the research that Dr. Lafi pursues and makes their focused investigation compelling for novel drug discovery. Marine sponges are among the animal kingdom’s most prolific sources of novel pharmaceutical compounds. Natural products have long been used to treat human disease (aspirin from the willow and digitalis from the foxglove, for example) and many marine bioactive compounds have been evaluated for properties as diverse as anti-inflammatory and anthelmintic. There are different ways you can screen compounds for bioactivity. One method involves isolating a fraction of the sponge to see if it can trigger a reaction in a human cell line. Usually many compounds are screened in parallel using robotic screening devices. Sequencing the gene of these symbiotic microbes using meta-genomics or meta-transcriptomic approaches may speed up this screening process. Using computational analysis to predict those pathways (groups of proteins working together) that are responsible for the chemical production of such bioactive molecules can help to target a certain family of molecules. In the Continued on p.2
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INSIDE:
News 1-2
Commencement 3
WEP 4-5
WEP Schedule Insert
Research 6-7
Community 8