David Olson - US grants

Fiji Terrestrial Arthropod Survey

A two-year grant has been awarded to the Bishop Museum under the direction of Dr. Neal Evenhuis to survey selected biodiverse terrestrial arthropods (insects and related organisms) of the Fiji islands and make the information from the survey (which will include databases, checklists, and scientific papers) available to a wide user community through the web and peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Fiji is one of the most unique island groups in the Pacific and as such offers opportunities for helping understand the biogeographic dynamics that have taken place in the southern island groups in the Pacific and their relationship to the faunas of surrounding land masses. The results of the surveys of the biodiverse terrestrial arthropod elements of these islands can be used as comparative examples when studying similar faunas of Samoa, New Caledonia, and other areas.
With $25,000 per year partnership funding from the Schlinger Foundation to augment funds from NSF, this project will significantly help increase our knowledge of the unique terrestrial arthropod fauna of the Fiji islands and make available to researchers the specimens collected. These researchers will sort and identify new species and publish descriptions of them in peer-reviewed papers. It is estimated that there will be over 500 new species of flies, beetles, aquatic bugs, ants, wasps, and spiders that will be discovered and described by specialists during the course of this study.
After sorting, specimens collected during this project will be databased and sent to specialists worldwide who have agreed to further identify and describe new species they find in the material collected. This information will be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and the information also added to a list of all publications concerning Fiji terrestrial arthropods and a complete checklist of names of Fiji terrestrial arthropods, both lists of which will be made available via the web, electronically, and hard copy publication.
With added funding through a partnership with PACINET via the South Pacific Regional Environmental Programme (SPREP), research specialists who travel to Fiji to conduct surveys to collect organisms in their specialty will train in-country students through periodic workshops. These workshops will include hands-on teaching of how to collect, sort, and identify the various biodiverse insects and related arthropods of this study that occur in Fiji. Further community meetings will be held to inform villagers about the project and will be used as a medium for interaction between scientists and villagers in that both parties can learn from each other about the natural heritage of Fiji.

  PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT A preponderance of evidence from a combination of human imaging, postmortem studies, and animal models suggests that atrophy of neurons in the prefrontal cortex plays a key role in the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression, anxiety disorders, and addiction. These structural changes, such as the retraction of neurites and loss of dendritic spines, can potentially be counteracted by compounds capable of facilitating structural and functional neural plasticity. In fact, the promotion of neural plasticity in the prefrontal cortex has been proposed to play a crucial role in the therapeutic mechanism of fast-acting antidepressants and anxiolytics such as ketamine. Compounds from the iboga and ergoline families of natural products have shown enormous potential for promoting neuritogenesis, spinogenesis, and synaptogenesis in cortical neurons, and have demonstrated plasticity-promoting properties superior to ketamine. However, it is currently unknown which structural features of these molecules contribute to their efficacy. Our overall objective is to produce more effective and safer plasticity-promoting molecules through structure-activity relationship studies of these key scaffolds. To gain access to the large number of structural variants required for these studies, we propose novel synthetic routes to both the iboga and ergoline classes of natural products. The strategies we advance are significantly shorter than previously reported syntheses and allow for facile diversification and analog generation. The compounds that we design and synthesize will be assessed using novel in vitro neural plasticity assays developed in our lab. Ultimately, the work described here will fill the gap in our knowledge about how molecular structure impacts neural plasticity and will prove instrumental to the evolution of next-generation neurotherapeutics.

  PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT A preponderance of evidence from a combination of human imaging, postmortem studies, and animal models suggests that atrophy of neurons in the cortex and/or hippocampus plays a key role in the pathophysiology of both neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases such as depression, anxiety disorders, Alzheimer's disease, and frontotemporal dementia. These structural changes, such as the retraction of neurites and loss of dendritic spines, can potentially be counteracted by compounds capable of facilitating structural and functional neural plasticity. In fact, the promotion of neural plasticity in the prefrontal cortex has been proposed to play a crucial role in the therapeutic mechanism of fast-acting antidepressants and anxiolytics such as ketamine. Compounds from the iboga and ergoline families of natural products have shown enormous potential for promoting neuritogenesis, spinogenesis, and synaptogenesis in cortical neurons, and have demonstrated plasticity-promoting properties superior to ketamine. However, it is currently unknown which structural features of these molecules contribute to their efficacy. Our overall objective is to produce more effective and safer plasticity-promoting molecules through structure-activity relationship studies of these key scaffolds. To gain access to the large number of structural variants required for these studies, we propose novel synthetic routes to both the iboga and ergoline classes of natural products. The strategies we advance are significantly shorter than previously reported syntheses and allow for facile diversification and analog generation. The compounds that we design and synthesize will be assessed using novel in vitro neural plasticity assays developed in our lab as well as established cellular models of Alzheimer's disease. Ultimately, the work described here will fill the gap in our knowledge about how molecular structure impacts neural plasticity and will prove instrumental to the evolution of next-generation neurotherapeutics.

Project Summary A preponderance of evidence from a combination of human imaging, postmortem studies, and animal models suggests that atrophy of neurons in the prefrontal cortex plays a key role in the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression, anxiety disorders, and addiction. These structural changes, such as the retraction of neurites and loss of dendritic spines, can potentially be counteracted by compounds capable of facilitating structural and functional neural plasticity. In fact, the promotion of neural plasticity in the prefrontal cortex has been proposed to play a crucial role in the therapeutic mechanism of fast-acting antidepressants and anxiolytics such as ketamine. Compounds from the iboga and ergoline families of natural products have shown enormous potential for promoting neuritogenesis, spinogenesis, and synaptogenesis in cortical neurons, and have demonstrated plasticity-promoting properties superior to ketamine. However, it is currently unknown which structural features of these molecules contribute to their efficacy. Our overall objective is to produce more effective and safer plasticity-promoting molecules through structure-activity relationship studies of these key scaffolds. To gain access to the large number of structural variants required for these studies, we propose novel synthetic routes to both the iboga and ergoline classes of natural products. The strategies we advance are significantly shorter than previously reported syntheses and allow for facile diversification and analog generation. The compounds that we design and synthesize will be assessed using novel in vitro neural plasticity assays developed in our lab. Ultimately, the work described here will fill the gap in our knowledge about how molecular structure impacts neural plasticity and will prove instrumental to the evolution of next-generation neurotherapeutics.