Identifying Natural Product Biosynthetic Genes from a Soil Metagenome by Using T7 Phage Selection

摘要

Microbes from the natural environment have long been a major source of therapeutic reagents. During the golden age of antibiotic discovery, the natural products penicillin, vancomycin, and tetracycline were identified from bacterial culture and achieved historic success in mankind’s battle against infectious diseases. Currently, natural product molecules continue to contribute to the drug development pipeline. However, the poor yield of new chemical entities from bacterial culture has forced the pharmaceutical industry to scale down drug discovery programs based on natural products.One reason for the low success rate in the isolation of new bioactive compounds of bacterial origin is that less than 1% of microorganisms in nature are cultivable with current laboratory techniques.Consequently, only a minimal fraction of the natural product repertoire is accessible for activity-based screening with conventional cell culturing methods.