Project Summary
For the whole of human history, specific foods have had a reputation of being excellent for our health, the most recent western version being “Superfoods”. Because each natural food contains thousands of molecules with unknown functions, it can take years of painstaking research to understand their effect on our bodies. Often the funding for research into health promoting foods has been insufficient to come to a scientifically sound conclusion, despite high interest from the public in these matters. However, understanding the properties of genuine superfoods can lead to both better food advice and novel medicines and the latest methods in understanding the effects of small molecules make the methods easier.Cordyceps fungi are highly prized in the Far East as health food and traditional medicine. One of their active ingredients, cordycepin, has been under investigation since 1950 (CUNNINGHAM et al., 1950). It is now known to have therapeutic properties in many animal models of disease and is likely to have a mechanism of action that involves the modulation of signal transduction pathways and the inhibition of inflammation, but how it achieves these effects is still obscure (Radhi et al., 2021). We are now integrating the data of high throughput analytical techniques, including transcriptomics, metabolomics and proteomics to understanding the way in which cordycepin affects signal transduction. This Systems Biology approach is leading to new insights in how cordycepin may be affecting the human body. Summer students are invited to participate in both the computational analysis of our data as well as in the laboratory experiments that are required to test the hypotheses generated by this work. They will learn to do bioinformatics, western blotting, quantitative PCR and immunoprecipitation and may contribute to the preparation of samples for RNA-seq. A successful project will earn the student a co-authorship of the paper that we are preparing and be an excellent preparation for a career in the biosciences.
CUNNINGHAM, K.G., MANSON, W., SPRING, F.S., and HUTCHINSON, S.A. (1950). Cordycepin, a metabolic product isolated from cultures of Cordyceps militaris (Linn.) Link. Nature 166, 949.
Radhi, M., Ashraf, S., Lawrence, S., Tranholm, A.A., Wellham, P.A.D., Hafeez, A., Khamis, A.S., Thomas, R., McWilliams, D., and de Moor, C.H. (2021). A Systematic Review of the Biological Effects of Cordycepin. Molecules 26.