By Cheryl Lyn Dybas
Threading their way through tangled undergrowth, biochemist Ilya Raskin of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and botanist Slavik Dushenkov of Hostos Community College in the Bronx, New York, are bushwhacking through the wooded maze of an Indonesian jungle. The biologists, who study plants and human health, are not alone. With them are Ernawati Sinaga and other researchers at Indonesia’s Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, and scientists affiliated with Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry.
Raskin and Dushenkov are training plant biologists in Indonesia in modern methods of discovering and validating botanical medicines for the treatment and prevention of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
Funded by an international research training grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, with additional support from the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, the work is coordinated through the Center for Botanicals and Chronic Diseases. The center is headquartered at Rutgers University and directed by Raskin, along with Sinaga and Dushenkov.
“We’re working to merge two medical systems – ancient and modern – for the benefit of Indonesia,” says Raskin. “To do that, we’re fostering research scientists who can bridge these ways of thinking for the prevention and treatment of a range of diseases while conserving the country’s rainforests and other ecosystems that may hold leads to new cures.”
Their efforts are not a moment too soon. Indonesia, a land of biodiversity superlatives, is now undergoing massive deforestation, accelerating the loss of tropical species. The island nation ⎯ the largest archipelago in the world ⎯ is home to Southeast Asia’s immense coral reef, most of the world’s tropical peat forests, Earth’s largest mangrove forest, and more than 15% of the globe’s flora, including some 80,000 species of spore plants and more than 30,000 seed plant species. The Center for Botanicals and Chronic Diseases project addresses the need to conserve potentially life-saving bioactive compounds harbored in these Indonesian plants.
All plants produce primary substances for growth and, if they live in stressful conditions, secondary compounds, or metabolites, to protect them in demanding environments. Leads for new treatments, says Raskin, are often contained in secondary metabolites.
Initial research to find these compounds may now be performed right where the plants grow. It’s a new paradigm Raskin and Dushenkov have introduced. “Screens to Nature” brings pharmaceutical screens to nature in field-deployable bioassays rather than ferrying samples from nature to pharmaceutical labs. “This new way of looking at medicinal plants,” Raskin says, “is important to advancing medical research and education in Indonesia and other countries.”
Nature Meets Human Health
In the Screens to Nature antibacterial bioassay, for example, investigators identify and collect plants in the wild. Each plant’s location is recorded with a portable GPS unit and two small samples are obtained: one for extraction and one for identification, the latter to be kept as an herbarium specimen. Then an extract is prepared from the parts of a plant that may have medicinal value, whether leaves, bark, fruit or roots.
One screening involves placing a small, but bacteria-laden, saliva sample into each well of a 48-well plate. Then the plant extract is added. The plates incubate overnight. The next morning, they’re ranked on a scale of zero to three; the higher the number, the less bacterial growth in the sample. If a plant shows interesting results, laboratory-based assays often follow.
Other Screens to Nature bioassays evaluate whether plant extracts might be used to regulate blood sugar levels, fight parasitic and viral infections, or increase immune function. “The bioassays provide a simple platform that’s great for students and others to gain insights into the complicated path of characterizing beneficial compounds from plants,” Dushenkov says.
Adds Raskin, “Ownership of all Screens to Nature data and discoveries is assigned to the country where the work was done.” In addition to its use in Indonesia, the researchers have deployed Screens to Nature in regions such as Central Asia, South America and the Mediterranean.
From Cave Medicine to Metabolomics
Knowledge of botanical medicines likely goes back to the days of the Neanderthals, who disappeared between 30,000 and 24,000 years ago. Scientists have discovered evidence for the use of medicinal plants in a cave in what’s now northern Spain, trapped in the remains of a Neanderthal’s dental calculus.
Fast-forward to the 1950s and 60s. Those decades were heydays of modern drug discovery from natural products – the chemicals produced by living organisms. Many of the antibiotics and chemotherapies we know today, such as the antibiotic Gentamicin from a bacterium and the anti-cancer drug Vincristine from the Madagascar periwinkle plant, were developed during that time.
Now one-quarter of existing medicines is based on plants. The most common such drug is salicylic acid, or aspirin, extracted from the bark of the willow tree.
To help find the next new botanical treatment, Raskin, Dushenkov and colleagues have taken Screens to Nature another step, with the development of what they call RAMES, or RApid Metabolome Extraction and Storage technology. The metabolome is the total number of metabolites in an organism, cell or tissue. Indonesian scientists such as Sinaga are using RAMES technology to create the first metabolomic library of Indonesian plant species, dubbed MAGIC, for the Metabolome and Genome Innovation and Conservation library.
The Indonesia MAGIC library is a miniaturized, easily transportable collection that currently contains some 501 metabolome samples from 296 species. Among them are such plants as Crossandra pungens, known as firecracker plant for the seeds that shoot out from its pods like small firecrackers; Hibiscus tiliaceus, called the sea hibiscus or coast cottonwood, a flowering tree that lives along tropical coastlines; and Quassia amara, a small tropical evergreen shrub also referred to as Amargo, bitter-ash or bitter-wood.
Collection sites for Indonesia MAGIC library species include Rawa Barat in South Jakarta, the Bogor Botanical Garden in West Java, Tabanan in Bali, and Serpong in Banten, along with nearly two dozen other locales to date. “This first-of-its-kind Indonesia library will foster collaborative research into plant metabolomics and natural products across the Southeast Asia region,” says Sinaga.
According to Raskin, “The Indonesia MAGIC library was created solely by Indonesian scientists using technology developed in the U.S. then transferred to Indonesia. We enable local scientists, including graduate students, to research their own country’s plants.”
The group held its first international workshop in Indonesia in July 2022, with a subsequent international workshop in May 2023, the latter in conjunction with the 8th Indonesia Biotechnology Conference. The 2023 meeting featured 19 keynote speakers from four countries; 293 participants from 61 institutions attended. It took place in Bali and was organized by scientist Enny Sudarmonowati of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency.
Presentations addressed topics such as the history and future of plants and human health; Indonesia’s fruits, including rose myrtle (Rhodomyrtus tomentosa), as potential sources of functional foods for the management of metabolic syndrome diseases like diabetes; drug discovery and development from Indonesia’s seagrasses and other marine species; and the perils of doing too little to conserve biodiversity.
New Cures-in-Waiting
Can plants offer an unending stream of new findings for human health? Hundreds of new drugs may be waiting in botanical sources, scientists say.
Those discoveries can only happen if plant biodiversity is protected, according to a report by the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC). The GSPC’s aim is “to secure a sustainable future where human activities will support the diversity of plant life, and where in turn the diversity of plants supports and improves our livelihoods and well-being.”
With their efforts in biodiverse nations such as Indonesia, the work of Center for Botanicals and Chronic Diseases scientists takes us far down that viny trail.
About The Author
Award-winning science journalist and ecologist Cheryl Lyn Dybas (cheryl.lyn.dybas@gmail.com), a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers, is a Contributing Editor at Ocean Geographic magazine. She also contributes to numerous other publications. Eye-to-eye with the wild is her favorite place to be.
This piece was prepared online by Panuruji Kenta, Publisher, SEVENSEAS Media