UM Sea Secrets Lectures 2022

Sea Secrets 2022 with Bradley Moore, Ph.D.

Bradley Moore, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Director, Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Scripps Institution of Oceanography & the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, UC San Diego

Reading and Writing the Genetic Code of Marine Life to Cure Human Disease
All organisms on land and in the sea are expert chemists. In a competitive and crowded world, they depend on their specialized chemicals to perform specific life functions central to reproduction, defense, and communication. Many of these same natural chemicals perfected through time have become drugs to cure human disease. As all of nature’s chemical wonders are encoded in DNA, a new era of scientific discovery has emerged to mine genomes to discover and create new medicine in the laboratory. Some of the chemically most vibrant organisms with the least understood genomes are from the sea, including microbes, algae, and sessile animals.

Dr. Moore will present his chemical genomics research to translate the genetic code of marine life to supply new drug candidates to treat disease. Bradley Moore is a biochemist who specializes in reading and writing the genetic code of marine microbes, algae, and sessile animals to develop new ocean-based medicines and molecular tools to treat human disease. His laboratory pioneered the mining of genomes to discover gene networks that code for natural, bioactive chemicals that support the specialized lifestyles of marine organisms. This work has led to new medicines and new gene tools to monitor oceanic toxins. Dr. Moore has published over 240 peer-reviewed articles and has been recognized by the National Institutes of Health, the American Chemical Society, the American Academy of Microbiology, and other scientific societies.