Our-Team

C-GRO

B I O S C I E N C E S

Contact Us

Home

Our Team

Products

OUR TEAM

Interested in learning more?

In forming C-GRO Biosciences in 2011 we compiled a team with over 50 years of combined experience in chemically validating and standardizing natural products for biomedical research. We continue to build upon two decades of collaborations initiated by the Crews research group in providing marine natural products to both academic and commercial laboratories for conducting research at the interface of molecular, cellular and developmental biology. Our two member team has joined forces with a diverse group of consultants that includes researchers and technicians highly skilled in the preparation of our products.

Tyler's scientific career has focused on the study of chemically validating and standardizing the use of natural products for biomedical research. He began by working in the natural products and biotech industry under the tutelage of Anthony Almada, (co-founder EAS) and for Santa Cruz Biotechnology. He then transitioned into the laboratory of Professor Phillip Crews (UC Santa Cruz) where he received his bachelor's degree in Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and PhD in Chemical Oceanography with an emphasis on biologically active marine natural products. He is a co-author on over 25 scientific papers involving biologically active natural products and continues to be actively involved in natural products research. He has served an adjunct instructor at San Jose City College and UC Santa Cruz teaching courses in introductory organic and biochemistry, oceanography as well as the chemistry of nutrition. Tyler conducted postdoctoral research in the department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology at UC Berkeley investigating therapeutic leads from medicinal plants and microorganisms as part of an NIH sponsored International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG) program with Indonesia. He is now an associate professor of chemistry at Dominican University of California.

Clay obtained his BSc. degree in fisheries biology from the University of Washington with a focus in hatchery design for marine invertebrates. In addition he has more than 20 years experience as a diving instructor and 10,000 hours working in the underwater world as an underwater photographer, dive guide and aggressor fleet boat captain. He has managed commercial shellfish hatcheries and set-up a pilot hatchery to raise disease-resistant shellfish in the Chesapeake Bay. He is an expert in Indonesian coral reef ecology and is the co-author of Guide to Marine Life: Caribbean, Bahamas and Florida, ISBN-10: 1881652068

Clay Wiseman, BSc. Co-founder. Diving Specialist - Marine Invertebrate Zoology

Tyler Johnson, PhD. Co-founder & Chief Scientific Officer

Karen Tenney, BSc. (Consultant) Industry Liaison

Karen's education and research experience encompass diverse areas including molecular, cell, and cancer biology, biomedicine, enzymology, fungal genetics, genomics, protein chemistry, marine chemical biology, natural products, and pharmacognosy. She has a bachelors degree (Magna Cum Laude) in biology and a minor in chemistry from Case Western Reserve University. Karen has served as the laboratory research coordinator and primary liaison between the UC Santa Cruz Marine Natural Products research group to multiple on- and off-campus collaborators since 2001. This included her involvement in the NIH sponsored Natural Products National Cooperative Drug Discovery Group grant (U19-NPNCDDG) headed by Professor Crews in collaboration with The Scripps Institute of Oceanography (TSIO), Florida Atlantic University and the Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research (NIBR). She has also played pivotal role facilitating collaborations with the Josephine Ford Cancer Center to discover new and biologically active natural products with the potential to serve as therapeutic leads. For her involvement in these highly collaborative projects she has been listed as a co-author on over 40 scientific publications.

Steven Loveridge, BSc. MSc. (Consultant) Technical officer

Steven received his BSc. and MSc. degrees in chemistry from UC Santa Cruz conducting research and serving as the lead technician in the laboratory of professor Phil Crews. He has an intimate knowledge of the fundamental workings of advanced spectroscopic instruments used for the isolation and or elucidation of biologically small molecules. His expertise involves the setup and maintenance of accelerated solvent extractors (ASE), HPLCs, tandem LC-MS instruments, evaporative light scattering detectors (ELSD) and high resolution mass spectrometers (HRMS). Steve has also served as the interim manager of the NMR facility at UC Santa Cruz overseeing the maintenance, operating software and application of three Varian instruments including two 500 MHz and one 600 MHz magnet equipped with a cryoprobe. He is a co-author on several scientific publications that focus on the discovery of biologically active natural products and or reports involving method development for the analytical techniques mentioned above.

Mitch Crews, BSc. (Consultant) LaboratoryTechnician

Mitch received his bachelors degree in Biology from San Francisco State University (SFSU) and has been a member of the UC Santa Cruz Marine Natural Products research laboratory since 2010. He is skilled in the culturing techniques required to grow both terrestrial and marine derived fungi. His expertise is also in the extraction of biologically active fungal derived natural products of which he has served as a co-author on several scientific publications.

Professor Phillip Crews, PhD. (Consultant) Adviser & Visionary

Professor Crews is the recipient of numerous awards in natural products chemistry which include The American Society of Pharmacognosy (ASP) lifetime achievement award, the ASP Best Paper of the Year award (2005, J. Nat. Prod.) and the J. Clarence Karcher Lecturer Award (University of Oklahoma). He's been elected as a fellow to the ASP as well as to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He's also the principal author of Organic Structure Analysis, (1998) from Oxford University Press, USA. It is one the most comprehensive academic texts dealing with the structure determination of organic molecules using advanced spectroscopic methods including mass spectrometry and NMR. His laboratory has been engaged in disseminating biologically active marine natural products for over 35 years enabling scientists to further investigate how these unique organic compounds affect targets in molecular, cellular and developmental biology. A number of seminal publications have acknowledged the Crews laboratory for providing chemically validated pure material that was crucial in the preparation of their experiments (1-3).

Professor Crews continues to maintain an active research group at UC Santa Cruz where his laboratory publishes regularly on the discovery and development of biologically active natural products. Currently he serves as an industry advisor and visionary for C-GRO.

Seminal Publications in Molecular & Cellular Biology Utilizing Products Provided by the Crews Research Group.

1) Ayscough, K. R.; Stryker, J.; Pokala, N.; Sanders, M.; Crews, P.; Drubin, D. G.

High Rates of Actin Filament Turnover in Budding Yeast and Roles for Actin in Establishment

and Maintenance of Cell Polarity Revealed Using the Actin Inhibitor Latrunculin-A

Journal of Cell Biology, 1997, 2, 399–416.

Citations: (ISI, Web of Science) - 546

2) Bubb, M.R.; Spector, I.; Beyer, B. B.; Fosen, K. M.

Effects of Jasplakinolide on the Kinetics of Actin Polymerization

Journal of Biological Chemistry, 2000, 275, 5163-5170.

Citations: (ISI, Web of Science) - 256

3) Platani, M.; Goldberg, I.; Lamond, A. I.; Swedlow, J. R.

Cajal Body dynamics and association with chromatin are ATP-dependent

Nature Cell Biology, 2002, 4, 502-508.

Citations: (ISI, Web of Science) - 165

...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

CONSULTANTS

Double click here to add text.