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JENNIFER ALLMAN - Marine Natural Products Group Project Coordinator,
University of Mississippi
The Research: Collection Efforts of the University of Mississippi Marine Natural Products Program
Jennifer Allman organizes most aspects of the Ole Miss team's collection efforts. This includes securing the required collection permits for
work in the U.S. or abroad, making travel arrangements, and shipping, logging in, and storing collected samples. She also maintains the
group's growing repository of extracts. The logistics are especially complex with work in foreign countries where remote collection sites,
shifting government regulations and requirements, and security issues are especially challenging. The group's field work is currently
focused on Jamaica, Indonesia, and Egypt, but also involves sample collection in Florida and Hawaii.
 - VIDEO CLIP 1: "Life in the Lab"
 First Things First: Permitting
One of the greatest challenges in collecting biomedical samples in a foreign country comes long before anyone gets in the water.
Each country has different legal requirements for granting permission to scientists to collect samples, and when a country's
government shifts, there is no guarantee the requirements won't change.
The Ole Miss team currently has the required material transfer agreements with Indonesia, Egypt and Jamaica, some of which took
years to obtain. In some cases, countries require that scientific collectors pay royalties either in the form of fees for each
sample collected in that country, or as a share of future profits from drugs discovered there.
Countries may also have additional demands, such as Jamaica, which requires that foreign collectors provide a complete set of
voucher samples, complete sets of log books, and reports on all bioactivity data generated. Allman says complying with such
requirements is extremely time consuming, and includes a number of challenges such as having to ensure that the samples get to the
right person instead of being pushed around through different agencies. If any of the requirements are not met, even inadvertently,
it can lead to delays during future collections.
Thankfully for Allman, though U.S. states do require scientific collection permits, obtaining and maintaining them is fairly
straightforward. Currently the team is approved for work in Hawaii and Florida.
- VIDEO CLIP 2: "Work at Discovery Bay, Jamaica, and Elsewhere"
Getting the Samples Home
During most (though not all) of its travels, the team does not have the luxury of an accessible Federal Express store, so they
typically return home by plane with loads of coolers filled with frozen samples, cooled and packed using dry ice when possible.
These days getting anything through an airport can be a challenge, but traveling internationally with coolers filled with strange
frozen lumps can be particularly difficult. "Getting through the airport," says Allmann, "That's always tricky."
On a recent trip to Jamaica, security officers felt compelled to search every cooler by hand. Not a pleasant decision to hear when
dealing with 200 samples in well-taped coolers and a looming plane departure. Allman allows the sponge specimens did look a bit
like brain samples, and the officers couldn't quite tell what any of it was, but they nonetheless let them pass. Even so, says
Allman, "we do prefer bringing them back on the plane with us, so that we know they're not sitting in a room at customs somewhere
spoiling."
The group does most of its own sample collection via scuba, rebreather, or snorkeling, but also collaborates with researchers in
the countries where they work who ship some samples to them.
- VIDEO CLIP 3: "Thoughts on Working in Remote Locations"
- VIDEO CLIP 4: "Maintaining a Natural Extract Repository, Compound Screening"
Education
Allman received her bachelor's degree in Biology and Chemistry at the University of Alabama, in Birmingham, where she also worked
in a molecular biology laboratory before moving to the University of Mississippi.
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