Pheromones and Other Semiochemicals for Monitoring Rare and Endangered Species

As global biodiversity declines, biodiversity and conservation have become ever more important research topics. Research in chemical ecology for conservation purposes has not adapted to address this need. During the last 10-15 years, only a few insect pheromones have been developed for biodiversity and conservation studies, including the identification and application of pheromones specifically for population monitoring. These investigations, supplemented with our knowledge from decades of studying pest insects, demonstrate that monitoring with pheromones and other semiochemicals can be applied widely for conservation of rare and threatened insects. Here, I summarize ongoing conservation research, and outline potential applications of chemical ecology and pheromone-based monitoring to studies of insect biodiversity and conservation research. Such applications include monitoring of insect population dynamics and distribution changes, including delineation of current ranges, the tracking of range expansions and contractions, and determination of their underlying causes. Sensitive and selective monitoring systems can further elucidate the importance of insect dispersal and landscape movements for conservation. Pheromone-based monitoring of indicator species will also be useful in identifying biodiversity hotspots, and in characterizing general changes in biodiversity in response to landscape, climatic, or other environmental changes

Interaction of the anticancer gallium(III) complexes of 8-hydroxyquinoline and maltol with human serum proteins.

Tris(8-quinolinolato)gallium(III) (KP46) and tris(maltolato)gallium(III) (GaM) are promising orally active antitumor metallodrugs currently undergoing clinical trials. Their interaction with human serum albumin (HSA) and transferrin (Tf) was studied in detail in aqueous solution by the combination of various methods such as spectrofluorometry, UV-vis spectrophotometry, 1H and saturation transfer difference NMR spectroscopy, and ultrafiltration-UV-vis spectrophotometry. Binding data were evaluated quantitatively. Tf was found to replace the original ligand much less efficiently in KP46 than in GaM, whereas a significant noncovalent binding of KP46 with HSA (log K' = 4.04) retaining the coordination environment around gallium(III) was found. The interaction between HSA and KP46 was also confirmed by protein-complex modeling calculations. On the basis of the conditional stability constants, the distribution of gallium(III) in serum was computed and compared for these metallodrugs under physiological conditions, and revealed the prominent role of HSA in the case of KP46 and that of Tf for GaM