NETHERLANDS: Dutch flowers grow in sea shells to enable all-year-around flowering

Under pressure from global competition, innovative Dutch flower growers have decided to try give their flowers an advantage by planting bulbs in carefully washed sea shells. Better than soil, sea shells enable all-year-round flowering to maximize production of Galantamine, a bio-active molecule registered as a lead compound in the new family of drugs used to cure early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Creating almost a lab-like environment for fresh flower bulbs, sea shells can be easily controlled by human manipulation of temperature, nutrients and water flow necessary for the bulbs to grow into flowers. "Shells are very clean, so that the bulb will be also very clean. After that we can give them the right temperature so we can produce a year-around flowering. Thirdly we can give them the right nutrients, " Jos Zuidgeest, CEO of Holland Biodiversity explained to Reuters. He believes this is the only such experiment in Europe. Leading Dutch grower Jaap Leenen, who won seven out of ten annual national awards for the best flower, plants his Daphodilles in sea shells, ensuring an all-year-round production of galantamine. "Now it's very important to know what level of galantamine every Daffodil has. Now we started with that product, so we can use that information to breed [flowers] also to bring the level of galantamine in Daffodils on a higher level," he said. Galantamine can also be synthesized in the lab, but it is much cheaper and easier to extract it from Daffodils' bulbs. Leiden University provides for extraction process. Pure galantamine is an alkaloid in the form of white powder, extracted from the bulb by grinding it and shaking it in a bath of cold acids. But galantamine is only one of a multitude of bio-active compounds in a single Daffodil flower bulb, which might be interesting as potential lead compounds for new drugs. Teus Luijendijk from Phytoconsult, a contracted researcher at Leiden University, does not have resources for testing new compounds. According to him, only the leading pharmaceutic industry giants might decide to find time and money needed to test millions of bio-active molecules in a bulb, of which only a few might bring results. "The flower bulbs of Amaryllidaceae and related families contain a lot of unusual molecules and therefore maybe interesting to provide new so-called lead compounds that could be used as a new drug. Takes a lot of time and money, and when they find the hit and have the lead compound, the prospects are good for producing it as a new drug, it takes at least eight years before you have all the clinical studies done," he said. Unless the pharmaceutical industry manages to speed up the process of testing, many potential new drugs based on bio-active molecules in plants might never be discovered, simply because there are too many molecules in a bulb and we have no idea which one to test first.

ITN Source | April 21, 2007

Tags:. .giants. .europe. .competition. .cold. .annual