Ecology and genomics of Actinobacteria: new concepts for natural product discovery
Actinobacteria constitute a highly diverse bacterial phylum with an unrivalled metabolic versatility. They produce most of the clinically used antibiotics and a plethora of other natural products with medical or agricultural applications. Modern ‘omics’-based technologies have revealed that the geno...
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Published in | Nature reviews. Microbiology Vol. 18; no. 10; pp. 546 - 558 |
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Main Authors | , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
London
Nature Publishing Group UK
01.10.2020
Nature Publishing Group |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Actinobacteria constitute a highly diverse bacterial phylum with an unrivalled metabolic versatility. They produce most of the clinically used antibiotics and a plethora of other natural products with medical or agricultural applications. Modern ‘omics’-based technologies have revealed that the genomic potential of Actinobacteria greatly outmatches the known chemical space. In this Review, we argue that combining insights into actinobacterial ecology with state-of-the-art computational approaches holds great promise to unlock this unexplored reservoir of actinobacterial metabolism. This enables the identification of small molecules and other stimuli that elicit the induction of poorly expressed biosynthetic gene clusters, which should help reinvigorate screening efforts for their precious bioactive natural products.
Actinobacteria are versatile producers of bioactive natural products. In this Review, van Wezel and colleagues discuss ecological and genomic insights into the mechanisms governing natural product metabolism and how those insights can be translated into approaches for computational and experimental genome mining strategies that yield novel bioactive molecules, in particular antibiotics. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-3 content type line 23 ObjectType-Review-1 |
ISSN: | 1740-1526 1740-1534 |
DOI: | 10.1038/s41579-020-0379-y |