While researchers around the world comb through compost in search of bacteria able to produce the next generation of antibiotics, Australian scientists are staking out an unusual locale.
They are searching for their billion-dollar harvest in a region long regarded as barren: Antarctica.Its gravelly soil and frozen waters, once considered sterile, are actually home to thousands of species of bacteria not found elsewhere in the world, according to Dr. Peter Franzmann, founder of the Australian Collection of Antarctic Micro-organisms.
And some of those species may be harboring the next big pharmaceutical drug. The antibiotics produced by the as-yet-unknown bacteria may be cures for diseases.
In addition, some of the bacteria may have waste-eating capacities useful in cleaning up oil and other pollutants.
"We don't know exactly what that potential is, other than the fact that because Antarctic organisms have to cope with extreme environments, they develop mechanisms and pathways to enable them to exist at low temperatures, high salinity, low water activities," said Carol Mancuso Nichols, curator of the bacteria collection.
Every fraction of an ounce of Antarctic gravel contains a million bacteria, said Franzmann. Of the 70 types of Antarctic bacteria researchers have isolated, about half were producing antibiotics - a reasonable hit rate, he said.
The collection of bacteria, a decade old this week, is rapidly expanding under the auspices of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Center in Hobart.
The center's business manager Rodney Cameron-Tucker said no other country was investigating the commercial potential of Antarctic bacteria.
Nichols asks every research team that enters a new area on Antarctica to bring back a spoonful of soil - with its some 2 million bacteria - or a test-tube of water.
"(They) may produce some sort of interesting biochemical that can be used pharmaceutically," she said.