With an area of 14 million square kilometers - one and a half times larger than Brazil's - almost completely covered with an average ice thickness of 2. 1 kilometers (but which in some points can reach almost five kilometers), the icy vastness of Antarctica is an extreme environment. But for this reason, it is a propitious region for the emergence and evolution of unique species with exotic metabolisms that increase the chance of development - and discovery - of new substances, which may give rise to new drugs for the treatment of various diseases, and among them cancer.
This is what researcher Leonardo José Silva, from the University of São Paulo (USP), in Piracicaba, discovered when studying a bacteria called Deschampsia Antarctica that lives in the grass, which only exists in Antarctica. He traveled to the mainland between November and December 2014 with a group of other Brazilian researchers. There, she collected small soil samples, packed the samples in airtight plastic bags and stored them in an ultrafreezer at - 80 ° C (negative).
Later, when studying the bacteria in the grass, he discovered that several of them produced compounds capable of inhibiting the development of glioma (a type of cancer that occurs in the brain and in the spinal cord), tumors in the breast and in the lung. The entire research was conducted between February 2014 and July 2018.
This is because the inhospitable region reconciles important factors for the establishment of unusual metabolic pathways, such as extreme environmental conditions, low gene flow, endemic species (which only exist there) and little human influence, which can favor the production of substances of biotechnological importance.
Source: BBC Brazil
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