Abstract
Advances in the taxonomic characterization of microorganisms have accelerated the rate at which new producers of natural products can be understood in relation to known organisms. Yet for many reasons, chemical efforts to characterize new compounds from new microbes have not kept pace with taxonomic advances. That there exists an ever-widening gap between the biological versus chemical characterization of new microorganisms creates tremendous opportunity for the discovery of novel natural products through the calculated selection and study of organisms from unique, untapped, ecological niches. A systematics-guided bioprospecting, including the construction of high quality libraries of marine microbes and their crude extracts, investigation of bioactive compounds, and increasing the active compounds by precision engineering, has become an efficient approach to drive drug leads discovery. This review outlines the recent advances in these issues and shares our experiences on anti-infectious drug discovery and improvement of avermectins production as well.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30901849, 30700015, 81102356, 81102369), MOST Key International Project 2007DFB31620 and 863 Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China (2007AA09Z443), and Chinese Academy of Sciences Innovation Project (KSCXZ-YW-G-013, KSCX2-YW-R-164). This work was also supported in part by the National Science and Technology Pillar Program (no. 200703295000-02) and Important National Science and Technology Specific Projects (no. 2008ZX09401-005).
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Xueting Liu and Krishna Bolla have contributed equally to this paper.
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Liu, X., Bolla, K., Ashforth, E.J. et al. Systematics-guided bioprospecting for bioactive microbial natural products. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 101, 55–66 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-011-9671-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-011-9671-1