BIO profile: Hunting down the oil-loving extremophiles

Last November, American biotech company PaleoTechnology International signed a unique research collaboration with Victoria's Box Hill Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE), in which Box Hill students will gain hands-on experience in the lab while studying for their degree.

It is an unusual agreement that is thought to be a world-first and will involve PaleoTechnology functioning as a company-in-residence at the institute and undergraduate students learning skills in dire need in the biotech industry.

PaleoTechnology is a subsidiary of Colorado-based PetroHunter Energy Corporation. Heading the venture is Dr Doug Steel, a biochemist and pharmacologist whose role is to hunt down and exploit fine chemicals and molecules found in petroleum environments and the microbes that somehow make a living there.

PetroHunter is a petroleum and commercialisation company that develops petroleum deposits that other petrol hunters aren't particularly interested in. Specifically, it develops heavy oil, often containing high sulphur levels, which is typically used in products like asphalt for paving roads or roofing. It also works in basin-centred gas accumulation, finding depressions under the earth where natural gas has accumulated over millions of years. As Steel puts it, "You can just poke a few holes in the ground and out she comes".

For PaleoTechnology, the interest is not in oil or gas but the chemicals and microbes found in those extreme environments. "We don't really care what microbe we are looking at, we are more concerned with what it does," Steel says.

"The general approach is that micro-organisms that live in extreme environments, be they petroleum environments or brine, tend to have sloppy genomes. The rate of repair isn't as efficient or effective as a tissue in a human body, because they had to be flexible to adapt. So, microbes from extreme environments tend to be much better at being tailored to a particular function.

"The underground environment of a petroleum deposit is similar in many ways to the deep-sea thermal vent smokers and they have novel ways of dealing with alternative carbon sources, so one of our goals is looking at novel energetic pathways."

PaleoTechnology is also looking at salty environments, in which microbes have developed ways to protect themselves from the effects of direct sunlight.

"They've also evolved a lot of proton pumps and things that move ions into and out of the cell," Steel says.

"Where I'd like this to go is what are called bio-batteries, where instead of your standard AA battery you actually engineer a bacterial-based system to move electrons around."

The company will focus on four core technology areas, he says: biochemical discovery, microbial biotechnology, gaseous solvent extraction technology (GSET) and sustainable materials. GSET is a technology that the parent company has had its eye on for a number of years and recently acquired licenses and patents to be able to commercialise it.

The solvents are predominantly fluorocarbons, which have application in human health as propellants in asthma inhalers and the like. They will also be investigated for potential applications in volatile oil extraction.

"It was found in the 1980s that these compounds could be used to extract oil, and they can extract oil either from petroleum or from bio-mass," Steel says. "Our interest is using solvents for extracting essential oils from botanical matter that may be useful for the fragrance and flavouring industries.

"Also, plants communicate with one another through the release of volatile oils - it's the way they alert other plants that they are ready to be pollinated or that they are being preyed on by caterpillars. We are interested in isolating some of the signalling molecules in plants. In the future, I expect we will marry this project up with a more molecular approach that looks at the genes that are involved in essential oil and volatile oil synthesis.

"A couple of our immediate applications are that we are interested in microbes that can break down heavy oil, both to remove contaminants and toxins as well as to break it down into light hydrocarbons that can be used for fuel. So if we can increase the value of a single barrel of oil then that's how I make my parent company happy."

Applied science

It should make the students at Box Hill TAFE very happy as well. Box Hill introduced a bachelor degree in biotechnology and innovation in 2005, with the aim of training students for applied science in the biotechnology industry. Dr Brendan Grabau, manager of the Centre for Biotechnology & Animal Sciences at Box Hill Institute, says the main aim is to train students to enter a lab and actually know what to do.

"[The students] do science subjects - molecular biology, biochemistry - but they are also doing project management, legal and regulatory frameworks, biostatistics. They are getting a taste of everything."

In addition to PCR, DNA analysis and other lab skills, the students undertake a bioprocessing course, which teaches them skills in extractive sciences, high performance liquid and gas chromatography (HPLC/GC) and biofermentation.

"They are three terrific skills that the students develop and then go out into the workforce," Grabau says. "There is a real shortage of students who understand bioprocessing, particularly in areas like vaccine production. Extractive technology and sciences have kind of gone by the wayside in the last few years but with HPLC and GC, there is more and more interest."

Grabau and Steel were the driving forces behind establishing the partnership, fortuitously so. "We met because of an American biotechnology professor named Dr Tami Goetz," Steel says. "She had received US federal government funding to create a model program in which students could do contract biotechnology work. Brendan and Box Hill expressed interest in her model and Brendan met Tami and at that time I was an adviser to her enterprise, which was called InnovaBio. Through the introduction we realised there was an opportunity.

"What's wound up happening through our partnership is that we are not using the InnovaBio model of contract research but we are a company in residence. They are students during the school year when school is in session, and PaleoTechnology is providing scholarship support to the institution. When school is not in session we pay a stipend to the students - which is an hourly stipend, not a salary - that will allow the students to work in our labs."

The pair see the collaboration as something that will not only benefit their own enterprises but might very well start something new in biotech altogether.

"There is one school of thought that the best use of economic development money and investment money is in basic research and academic research, because if you don't fuel the engine then you are never going to get companies down the road," Steel says. "We are taking a bit of a different view, which is that that's all right and good, but every technology goes through 10 or 20 years of working the kinks out of the process and what I refer to as assembling the tool box.

"I feel that biotechnology has reached the turning point where it's time for those who are entrepreneurs to stop building tools and starting making furniture. It's fine for research universities to continue to make tools but we are in a position now to train Box Hill students in applying biotechnology to real world problems and creating things. There will always be a place for graduate students, but undergrads don't need to understand the x-ray crystallographic structure of a restriction enzyme to be able to know how to engineer living systems.

"Some might say that is radical and some might say it's debatable, but we are basing our relationship on that assumption. The interesting thing with this company is that our parent is a petroleum company, we've taken no venture capital, and we justify what we do by solving problems for the parent company. Once we start doing that, we're free to go in any direction we want with biotech."

Box Hill students will also be working on projects arising from PetroHunter's development of seven million mineral acres of land in the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory. Oil and gas is known to exist there and the PaleoTechnology/Box Hill venture will be involved.

"We have some very special projects in mind for that," Steel says. "I can't give you details but our codename in the company for it is 'Nature paper'."

PaleoTechnology International and Box Hill Institute/BioSkills are exhibiting on the Australian Pavilion at BIO 2007.