Well, I would like to ask you to quickly introduce yourself, tell us where you are, what you do, and how you got into cinchona.

I am Nataly Allasi Canales, a scientific researcher with Quechua roots. My background is in genetic evolution and computer science. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, and at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. What I basically do is research useful plants from the Amazon and the Andes from different perspectives, including genomics, metabolomics, archiving, ethnobotany, and ecology.

In addition to the great interest I have had in living beings since I was a child, I was very fortunate during my PhD to be part of Kew's paleogenomics project on cinchona bark. Paleogenomics means researching historical samples using genomic methods.

What exactly was your PhD research project?

It was a project to characterize, genotype, and genetically and chemically annotate the collections of cinchona bark found at Kew that have been collected since 1800. There are over a thousand specimens at Kew, just of bark, and the initial proposal was to do genetic characterization because many of these samples are labeled only as cinchona, or cascarilla, or some other vernacular name, but they don't say the name of the species, or it was wrong, because there have been quite a few cases of misidentification, but also sometimes due to carelessness and even adulteration.

Adulteration?

Adulteration, yes, because as the bark was very valuable, other types of bark that were similar in color were sometimes sold, especially from another species commonly known as Peruvian balsam. So the thesis would be something like to better understand the cinchona tree through archival, paleogenomic, and chemical or metabolomic lenses.

For example, from a genomic point of view, we can extract DNA from these ancient samples, which is highly degraded because the bark is already dead tissue, even when the plant is alive. Not only that, but also a large amount of alkaloids, which are of greater importance for the treatment of malaria.

When analyzed in the laboratory using genetic techniques, this large amount of alkaloids acts as an inhibitor in the reactions, which ultimately causes the tests to fail. In fact, in the first few months of my PhD, they failed a lot. I couldn't extract DNA from those bark samples until I finally went to a special laboratory for ancient samples where they analyze mammoth samples and all that. It was only then that these 200-year-old Cinchona samples finally worked and could be analyzed.

One thing that can be difficult to understand is the logic behind the existence of botanical archives, such as those at Kew Gardens. It's one thing to have a leaf from 200 years ago, but it's quite another to have a specimen and study it in vivo, which makes more sense, doesn't it? One would think that a sample of bark or herbariums are only left for visual posterity, as a visual reference... And it might sound, at best, romantic; at worst, unnecessary, as well as a waste of space.

First, about these visual records... two ideas about their usefulness. These old samples are, of course, taking up space. What are they good for? What are these plant museums for? After all, what are plants good for?

But even without considering that contemporary techniques can be used, and just by making a visual record, this tells us a lot about the diversity of ancient ecologies. We're not talking about ancient to the point of thousands of years, but at least ancient, yes, let's say post-colonization to pre-republic, or even post-colonization up to 50 years ago. That's more or less the cut-off point from which we started using these specimens in highly specialized laboratories for ancient specimens.

So even though this may not seem very informative, these records of the presence or absence of specimens and different species in a certain distribution also tell us a lot about the ancient ecology of regions. And number two, you would be very, very happy to know that genetics is not the only thing used to study these ancient molecules. In other words, not only is DNA used as a proxy, but also secondary metabolites, lipids, and proteins. All of these have different evolutionary scales that one can go further and further back in time. So, DNA is much more fragile than proteins or metabolites, but at the same time it is also more informative, evolutionarily speaking. Lipids are much more resilient, but they also have less evolutionary information. However, with them, one can go back millions of years.

All this to say that it is true that with these new techniques we can give new life to museum artifacts and specimens.

When was genetics invented?

The concepts of genetics? It was in the early 1900s with Gregor Mendel.

If genetics was born in 1900 but the samples in the Kew archives are from 1800... It took 100 years for the discipline to be born and perhaps 200 to have the concrete tools to study it. So that also paints archival practice not only as a matter of collecting backwards, towards what was, but also takes on a forward-looking angle. In other words, if you had talked to Linnaeus, for example, about genetics, he wouldn't have understood what language you were speaking, right?

No. Neither he nor Darwin would have understood.

For example, in the case of Cinchona, genetics is quite useful from a pharmacological and conservation point of view. So, first in conservation, for example, we have this large number of specimens mapped throughout South America from native trees. From the former colonies of the great empires. So, this means that we have a snapshot of that past, of that ecology at a point in space and time. It's not a prediction, but a reference, an accurate historical record. It's something that was there, and from that, if we do genetic analysis of the populations, we can know how diverse the populations of these species were, or how much hybridization there was between them.

What can you do with the decoding of DNA from a sample that is 200 years old?

So, all of this can give us an idea of what these forests were like 200 years ago, for example, right at the time when the greatest exploitation was taking place. This can help us formulate conservation guidelines for governments, because many efforts to find cinchona trees in natural areas, in ancient natural forests, are thwarted because there are not many trees left in their native territories. So this could help us say, “OK, then this tree should be on the IUCN Red List, legally protected by these international organizations.” This is for conservation purposes, but it could also be useful for future drug discovery.

Some regions of the genome encode certain enzymes that ultimately encode the production of metabolites, including quinine, cinchonidine, etc., which are the ones that have this antimalarial power. So, further genetic exploration of these ancient samples could also open a window to these ancient, but perhaps unique, samples that have certain differences from current trees and from which these genetic resources can be exploited, ethically of course.

How is this information useful to you, beyond historical data? Could it have any practical application, for example, for a pharmaceutical company that wants to produce more quinine?

This type of information can be very useful beyond its historical value. It could serve as evidence to guide conservation efforts, showing how overexploitation affects species, as has happened with animals and plants whose size or production has declined over time. In terms of commercial application, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur could use this information to identify species or varieties that produce more quinine. In fact, this has been done before; in Kew, an English pharmacist documented the chemical content of samples to identify varieties with higher quinoline content. For example, Cinchona calisaya, native to southern Peru and Bolivia, produces more alkaloids but is not commercially cultivated because of its adaptation to high altitudes. In contrast, species such as Cinchona pubescens or officinalis, which are better adapted to these regions, are cultivated in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

You studied quinine samples that arrived around 1800. Do you know where these samples came from, and why did Kew's quinine collection start in that year?

All the samples came from South America. Although I'm not sure of the exact reason why they arrived at Kew at that time, I suspect it is related to the overexploitation of cinchona in the 17th and 18th centuries, when almost half a million kilograms of cinchona were exported to Europe annually. Markham recommended to the English crown that they should start growing cinchona, because he foresaw that this resource would eventually run out. “We have to get hold of this resource, we have to grow it ourselves,” he said.

And from there, the imperial search for cinchona began.

The British Empire sent its explorers; the Spanish had already been sending them before, but the search became a little more intense.

So there are no older samples, from before the 18th century?

Not here in Kew, but there are some in Madrid. Now that you mention it, there is material in the Kew archives that was collected by the Spaniards Ruiz and Pavón, who carried out the Royal Botanical Expedition to Peru.

But they belonged to the rival empire, didn't they?

You would think so, but there are quite a few archives from Ruiz and Pavón in Kew, dating from 1777.

There are quite a few bark samples and even seeds from Pavón here, which is crazy considering they were enemy empires.

I don't know how many samples there are from Indonesia, India, or South America, because what I wanted to do was collect samples from all origins, sources, and collectors in order to capture the diversity of the collection.

To conclude this section, I would like you to elaborate on the importance of studying the biodiversity of native species in South America in general, and cinchona in particular, as a Peruvian.

This group of species is very important to me because I grew up in the Peruvian Amazon, in Madre de Dios. My parents are Quechua, and I am ethnically Andean.

Therefore, the worldview of my family and of having lived in the Amazon and the worldview of Amazonian cultures have converged in me since I was very young. I was always collecting snails, for example, or small insects that were very beautiful to me.

In fact, I wanted to be a veterinarian, believing that this would allow me to better understand life. Then, fortunately, I found out about the biological sciences degree.

So, I think that how we were raised on this side of the world has given me that perspective of understanding and also respecting and loving species that are not so different from our own. Even though we have gone through many terrible processes in our history, from colonization and wars, the ancestral knowledge and the species that coexist with us not only exist, but are thriving in this life!

And I feel that this resilience inspires me to have a great interest and fascination for our species. I see myself doing this my whole life.

It's also a little silly, maybe a little patriotic, but the stories I read as a child by Ricardo Parma about Peruvian traditions, where he tells the legend of the Countess of Chinchón... I think it's something that shapes people a little.

In general, it fills me with a lot of pleasure and pride to do this, and also to be able to do studies that are not 100% fundamental, but also applicable. And I realize this more and more when I talk to people outside my field of study. For example, many of the questions you've asked me today are ones I've never thought about before! And that's the cool thing about talking to people outside... and the ability to explain my research in two or three sentences so that someone with no background in genetics can understand is also important to me.

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