| Abstract Detail
Enriching basic and applied botany through multi-stakeholder collaborations Ott, Brittany [1], Hunter, Elizabeth [2], Kirk, Riley [3], Little, Damon [4], Bertin, Matthew [3], Literman, Robert [2], Sarmashghi, Shababeddin [5], Erickson, David [6], Bafna, Vineet [5], Wen, Jun [7], Handy, Sara [8]. The interface between Government, Academia and Industry: leveraging basic research for applied questions. In 2015, the total sales of herbal dietary supplements in the United Stated reached $6.92 billion, a 7.5% increase from the year before, and demand for botanicals has increased for 12 consecutive years. Many different chemical techniques have been used to monitor authenticity of supplements and more recently DNA-based tools have been included. Together with collaborators from government agencies, academia, testing laboratories and industry we can leverage data across many disciplines of biology and chemistry including food safety, natural product research, systematics, bioinformatics and genomics. This is true with database building, method development and method validation. Presented here are details for both FDA’s botanical sequencing and method development efforts. For this, it is essential that researchers have access to solid voucher specimens for comparisons to sample data. A collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution to collect FDA relevant plant species for three years has allowed for both a novel DNA sequence database of chloroplast genomes as well as raw read data from the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. An additional collaboration with the University of Rhode Island is providing FDA with medicinal plant species from the Heber W. Youngken Jr. Medicinal Garden and these specimens are also being added to a chloroplast genome/raw read databases. These data can be used for phylogenies, some developed with unique bioinformatic pipelines, by researchers interested in genes linked to natural products, by FDA and other government agencies, industry and any other researcher as complete chloroplast genomes or to design species specific assays to target plant species of interest. All data are publicly available through a bioproject in GenBank, e.g., PRJNA325670. Additionally, this chloroplast database has also been essential in developing as well as starting to validate a genome skimming method for plant identification. The New York Botanic Garden will use their botanical and dietary supplement knowledge and access to produce the samples needed for the validation study. This method has the potential to answer a plethora of both known and unknown questions for not only the FDA, but also other government laboratories, dietary supplement, and botanical drug industry researchers and testing laboratories. These projects exemplify the successful collaboration between academic and non-academic institutions and highlights alternative career paths in which botanical expertise is greatly needed and extremely valuable.
1 - United States Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, HFS-717, 5001 Campus Dr., College Park, MD, 20740, USA
2 - University of Rhode Island, Biological Sciences, 100 Flagg Road, Kingston, RI, 02881, USA
3 - University of Rhode Island, Pharmacy, Avedisian Hall, 7 Greenhouse Road, Kingston, RI, 02881, USA
4 - The New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern BLVD, Bronx, NY, 10458, United States
5 - University of California, San Diego, Computer Science and Engineering, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA
6 - JIFSAN, University of Maryland , Patapsco Building, Suite 2134, 5145 Campus Dr., College Park, MD, 20740, USA
7 - Botany, MRC-166 National Museum Of Natural History, 10th St. & Constitution Ave., NW, Mrc 166, Washington/DC, 20013, United States
8 - United States Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, HFS-717, 5001 Campus Dr., College Park, MD, 20740, United States
Keywords:
DNA based identification
applied botany
dietary supplements
food safety.
Presentation Type: Colloquium Presentations
Session: COL03, Enriching basic and applied botany through multi-stakeholder collaborations
Location: Virtual/Virtual
Date: Thursday, July 30th, 2020
Time: 11:45 AM
Number: COL03007
Abstract ID:148
Candidate for Awards:None |
