Isolating Bioactive Marine Invertebrate Extracts Using Brine Shrimp Lethality Assay Screening

Abstract

Natural products are defined as small molecules extracted and isolated from a source found in nature and are useful in applications such as medicine, agriculture and cosmetics. Due to their chemical diversity and biochemical relevance, the identification of bioactive compounds is significant to the pharmaceutical drug pipeline for their potential use towards the development of new medicine. In the ongoing search for new bioactive compounds, it is of great interest to identify those that are cytotoxic to cancer cells. The brine shrimp lethality assay is suitable for the preliminary screening of cytotoxic compounds since the brine shrimp’s lethality correlates well with the cytotoxicity of human cancer cells from the lung and colon lining. The aim of this work is to identify cytotoxic bioactive compounds for their potential use in pharmacology from screening marine invertebrate extracts. The evaluated extracts are derived from the University of Oklahoma Schmitz Sponge collection, which contains over 300 marine invertebrate samples. Each extract is screened utilizing the brine shrimp assay at a low, medium, and high concentration – 10.0 ppm, 50.0 ppm, and 100 ppm. Extracts indicating 70% lethality or greater are reinvestigated using a confirmation assay. Promising extracts will be fractionated by chromatographic methods, and then the bioactive compound identified using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and infrared spectroscopy.