ABSTRACT
When we initiated our marine pharmacology program in 1977, we developed a battery of screening tests designed to detect unusual biological activity of purified marine natural products with the view that some of these agents, once identified, could serve as useful experimental probes or models for future drug development. We decided to adapt the fertilized sea urchin egg as a cell culture system and determine if this test model provided us with unusual pharmacological results. Although not free of special drawbacks inherent in the system, the fertilized sea urchin egg has shown a significant degree of utility both as an experimental model for investigating mechanisms of drug action and as a selective screen that appears relatively insensitive to several classes of antineoplastic agents. This degree of selectivity afforded us the opportunity to identify several new classes of cell division inhibitors from marine sources that thus far appear to be exerting their effects by novel mechanisms of action [1–5]. Described here are details of this assay that we hope will prove helpful, as well as an overview of the results one can obtain. References refer the reader to published literature describing in more elaborate detail results on mechanisms of drug action obtained using this experimental model.
