Antarctic soil bacteria – unprecedented potential to produce novel secondary metabolites
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | Discovering novel antimicrobial compounds is one of the priorities of current and future medicine in response to increasing levels of multidrug-resistant pathogens. The vast majority of antimicrobials is derived from microbes. Recent years of antimicrobial research showed that extreme habitats and unexplored or yet uncultivated microorganisms dwelling there might represent the most promising sources of novel antimicrobials. This study, which is linked to the MetaBac platform at the University of Vienna, aims to explore Antarctic soil bacterial isolates as a source of novel natural products with antimicrobial activities. Multiple isolation methods have been applied to obtain pure cultures of novel taxa from Antarctic soils; with focus on taxa known for their remarkable secondary metabolite biosynthesis potential. Initial stages of this research aimed to taxonomically classify all isolates and evaluate their biosynthetic potential. As a result, a collection of 623, mostly slow growing isolates was established. More than 60% of these strains belonged to the phyla Actinobacteriota and Bacillota, including several novel species (Streptomyces, Nocardioides, Dietzia, Paenibacillus). Pseudomonadota was the next most abundant group in the strain collection. Current steps based on these results include experiments with representatives of several novel Streptomyces spp. including cultivation in different conditions along with analysis of their metabolomes and immediate evaluation of antimicrobial activities against clinically relevant yeasts, gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria. |
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