Innovations in Microbial Biodiscovery, Targeting Silent Metabolism and New Chemical Diversity

摘要

After 100 years of exploring microbial metabolites, there is genetic evidence of a potential silent secondary metabolism that may yield different classes of bioactive secondary metabolites. Secondary metabolite production is often limited by factors that have a great impact on the metabolic turnover such as culture conditions, including temperature, pH, media and salinity as well as strain improvement, optimization of media composition, variation in the culture conditions and exposure to chemical signalling such as in the case of microbial co-culture. As well as low molecular weight signalling molecules can play an important role in the regulation of secondary metabolite production, and in accessing silent genetic potential. We believe that silent genes may remain dormant and do not produce any metabolites until they become activated. They can be activated by chemical stimuli produced by other competing microbes. Such molecular tools could be used to unlock the silent secondary metabolism and more leading to next generation antibiotics. In recent years, microtiter plates have been presented as an alternative technique traditional shake flasks for optimizing cultivation of different microorganisms. For example, Duetz et al. developed a cultivation system employing 24 or 96-well square-shape micro-bioreactor plates (MTP). The aims of my research were to focuses on the isolation and structure elucidation of microbial natural products derived from marine or terrestrial microbes. At the same time, it focuses on finding new autoregulators that act as triggers to improve cellular development and activate the production of new secondary metabolites.