A Therapeutic Potential for Marine Skeletal Proteins in Bone Regeneration

Abstract

A vital ingredient for engineering bone tissue, in the culture dish, is the use of recombinant matrix and growth proteins to help accelerate the growth of cultivated tissues into clinically acceptable quantities. The skeletal organic matrices of calcifying marine invertebrates are an untouched potential source of such growth inducing proteins. They have the advantage of being ready-made and retain the native state of the original protein. Striking evidence shows that skeleton building bone morphogenic protein-2/4 (BMP) and transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) exist within various marine invertebrates such as, corals. Best practice mariculture and the latest innovations in long-term marine invertebrate cell cultivation can be implemented to ensure that these proteins are produced sustainably and supplied continuously. This also guarantees that coral reef habitats are not damaged during the collection of specimens. Potential proteins for bone repair, either extracted from the skeleton or derived from cultivated tissues, can be identified, evaluated and retrieved using chromatography, cell assays and proteomic methods. Due to the current evidence for bone matrix protein analogues in marine invertebrates, together with the methods established for their production and retrieval there is a genuine prospect that they can be used to regenerate living bone for potential clinical use.

Discovery and development of marine biomaterials

“…Protocols are well established now for the mass production of new proteins using a combination of site random mutagenesis followed by high-throughput screening (Kim, 2008;Green et al, 2013). This is an attractive proposition.…”

Identification of Mytilus edulis genetic regulators during early development

“…For this reason, apoptosis is another tightly regulated mechanism triggered during a defence state and histolysis, or purposely targeting unneeded or lessspecialized cells (Kiss, 2010). Furthermore, the structure of the ECM constitutes a dynamic scaffold-based circuitry with integrative components that promote cellular proliferation, migration, and tissue motion (Green et al, 2013). As a result, muscle (Dyachuk, 2013) and neural (Odintsova et al, 2010) cell differentiation depend on functional peptides and growth factors found in the ECM, which constitute basic requirements for muscle assembly, neural guidance, and synaptogenesis.…”

Transcriptomic Resilience of the Montipora digitata Holobiont to Low pH

“…Another down-regulated gene codes for a protein containing a platelet-derived growth factor domain, though the regulation of this kind of protein upon exposure to low pH has not been previously reported in corals. However, it is already known that homologs of human bone-morphogenesis proteins (BMP2/4) participate in skeleton production of marine calcifiers, including corals (Green et al, 2013). In fact, proteins carrying this domain are currently used for bone regeneration in humans, and its use, in combination with coral skeleton, has been proposed to treat bone defects (Parizi et al, 2012).…”