The natural products laboratory at Dampier, established in 1995, has opened new opportunities for the Marine Bioproducts group in Western Australia, which now has close ties with the Museum of Western Australia, Dampier Salt (Operations) Pty. Ltd., Edith Cowan University and Karratha College.

The Marine Drug Discovery Project has now conducted two major collections in Commonwealth waters of the Indian Ocean, from shallow in-shore sites to deep water sites to pristine reefs of the North-West Shelf. Each of these sites has been chosen to increase the diversity of the collection and enhance the likelihood of discovering molecules beneficial to medicine. The trips have involved staff from AIMS and the Western Australian and Northern Territory Museums, each of which collected their own samples.

A wide range of marine organisms, from bacteria to sponges, have been collected, with each collecting trip yielding several hundred organisms for extraction. These extracts, each containing hundreds of natural products, are screened for activity against various human diseases and disorders. Extracts from these collections have been processed and prioritised for the isolation of target bioactive molecules, a process now underway at the AIMS Dampier facility.

The project remains eager to develop strong collaborations with Western Australian scientists in the hope that potential drugs are developed. AIMS supports the development of a uniform national approach to marine drug discovery and access to the rich biological resources of Australia, and is committed to ensuring that fair and equitable benefits are returned to the ‘owner’ of the original source of a commercially successful drug.

An important aspect of coral recruitment is successful larval settlement. A paper by Morse et al. (1994) indicates that a chemical isolated from a coralline red algae may be necessary for the settlement of Agaricia humilis larvae. A search for similar inducers for Australian reef-building coral species is important for regeneration of degraded Australian reefs and to understand the underlying mechanisms of coral larval recruitment.

Experiments conducted at Lizard Is. indicate that several of crustose coralline algae and live coral core material are able to induce settlement of Acropora millipora larvae. These results suggest that the chemical trigger may be essential for settlement and metamorphasis of some Australian corals. This work will be extended to corals on the Ningaloo Reef in 1997 and may result in novel techniques for regeneration of damaged reefs.

Morse D.E., Morse A.N., Raimondi, P.T. and Hooker N. (1994). Morphogen-based chemical flypaper for Agaricia humilis coral larvae. Biological Bulletin 186:172-181.