Prospective fecal microbiomic biomarkers for chronic wasting disease.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a naturally occurring prion disease in cervids that has been rapidly proliferating in the United States. Here, we investigated a potential link between CWD infection and gut microbiome by analyzing 50 fecal samples obtained from CWD-positive animals of different sexes from various regions in the USA compared to 50 CWD-negative controls using high throughput sequencing of the 16S ribosomal RNA and targeted metabolomics. Our analysis reveals promising trends in the gut microbiota that could potentially be CWD-dependent, including several bacterial taxa at each rank level, as well as taxa pairs, that can differentiate between CWD-negative and CWD-positive deer.

Natural products dereplication by diffusion ordered NMR spectroscopy (DOSY).

Diffusion-ordered NMR spectroscopy (DOSY) can be used to analyze mixtures of compounds since resonances deriving from different compounds are distinguished by their diffusion coefficients (). Previously, DOSY has mostly been used for organometallic and polymer analysis, we have now applied DOSY to investigate diffusion coefficients of structurally diverse organic compounds such as natural products (NP). The experimental s derived from 55 diverse NPs has allowed us to establish a power law relationship between and molecular weight (MW) and therefore predict MW from experimental .

Antiplasmodial Alkaloids from the Australian Bryozoan .

An extract from the bryozoan with antiplasmodial activity was identified through high-throughput screening of an Australian marine invertebrate extract library against . Chemical investigation of resulted in the isolation of six new brominated alkaloids, convolutamines K and L ( and ), volutamides F-H (-), and 2,5-dibromo-1-methyl-1-indole-3-carbaldehyde (). Three of the compounds (-) displayed moderate to potent antiplasmodial activity against both the chloroquine-sensitive (3D7) and chloroquine-resistant (Dd2) parasite strains of with an IC range of 0.

Orthoscuticellines A-E, β-Carboline Alkaloids from the Bryozoan Collected in Australia.

Antiplasmodial high-throughput screening of extracts derived from marine invertebrates collected from northern NSW, Australia, resulted in the methanol extract of the bryozoan being identified as inhibitory toward the 3D7 strain of . Purification of this extract resulted in two new bis-β-carbolines that possess a cyclobutane moiety, orthoscuticellines A and B ( and ), three new β-carboline alkaloids, orthoscuticellines C-E (-), and six known compounds, 1-ethyl-4-methylsulfone-β-carboline (), 1-ethyl-β-carboline (), 1-acetyl-β-carboline () 1-(1'-hydroxyethyl)-β-carboline (), 1-methoxycarbonyl-β-carboline (), and 1-vinyl-β-carboline (). The structures of all compounds were determined from analysis of MS and 1D and 2D NMR data.