Ricerc@Sapienza

Nature's gifts have been used by mankind since ancient times, from the Amazon poisons used by natives up to more modern phytochemical based drugs. Terrestrial plants have always represented a good source for natural bioactive compounds discovery, e.g. phenolic secondary metabolites. Same chemical entities present in species coming from distant kingdoms often show a wider variety of biological activities, also thanks to the ability to interact and "communicate" with different biological systems. An example is represented by iridoids, a central biochemical bridge between plant and animal kingdom. These compounds, synthesized both in plants and insects, are a key tool for intra-species and inter-kingdom communication and their functions and biological activities are strongly connected. Another biochemical bridging point between two distant worlds such as terrestrial and marine organisms is represented by the class of sulfur-containing compounds. My preliminary ground-breaking results have highlighted for the first time the presence of the same organic sulfur metabolites in marine organisms and in humans.
This project is aimed to identify and characterize novel key common intermediates from the metabolism of evolutionally distant living beings, with a particular focus on sulfur metabolome. Conserved bridging points in the chemical evolution of "Life" will be investigated in ancestral marine and terrestrial organisms, plants and animals. For this purpose a metabolomics-based platform with advanced analytical methods, i.e. chromatographic, spectroscopic and spectrometric methods, will be set up. Different biological systems will be used for the evaluation of the role of converging common metabolites and sulfur-containing compounds in physiological and pathological conditions. Sulfur metabolism will be furthermore investigated in relation to nitrogen and carbon in order to provide a more complete scenario and shed light on the still unclear sulfur biochemical cycle