NAfrAM · Novel antibiotics from Antarctic microbes

Novel antibiotics from Antarctic microbes

Microbial resistance to antimicrobial compounds has become one of the biggest threats to global health. Infections and diseases caused by resistant microbes require prolonged health care, are easy to spread, are harder to treat, and increase the risk of severe health conditions or death. Although antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a long-term issue, the speed and extent of AMR have been underestimated over a long time. Nowadays, the cost of AMR has reached to large extent, not merely economically, but especially for human health and life. The antibiotic-resistant infections are nowadays among the biggest threats to global health with an estimated contribution to 4.95 million deaths in 2019 and a predicted increase to approximately 10 million deaths per year by 2050. Due to a long-lasting decline in antibiotic development since the 1970s, the lack of high-quality, effective antimicrobials remains one of the most severe issues; thus, novel antibiotics are urgently needed. A promising way to discover novel antibiotics is the identification of novel natural products (NPs). Largely diverse and complex scaffolds of NPs continue to be a major source for drug discovery including antibiotics. During the last decades, detailed bioinformatic and experimental investigation of genome-encoded NPs clustered into BGCs provided fascinating insights into the tremendous chemical diversity of bacteria-produced compounds. Besides, since high proportions of microbes across biomes remain uncultured, our knowledge about the natural diversity of specialized microbial metabolites is limited. Moreover, some molecules are biosynthesized only by a specific group of microorganisms or are specific to particular ecological niches and/or grow solely under natural conditions. Therefore, bioprospecting of the rarely studied environments represents a promising approach to discovering novel bioactive metabolites. One of the largely underexplored and simultaneously very extreme environments is Antarctica, where extensive genetic diversity of genes responsible for biosynthesis of NPs have been reported. The NAfrAM project investigated diverse microbial communities from different ecosystems in Antarctica with the major goal of discovering novel antibiotics and characterising the overall biosynthetic potential of these unique microbial communities to produce unknown bioactive compounds. The project stands on deep-sequencing data that allow precise exploration of genetic information of studied Antarctic microbial communities. The bioinformatic search for biosynthetic gene clusters (BGC), which represents a recipe for the biosynthesis of natural products available in genetic information, enables the identification of novel BGCs and prioritization of BGCs likely-encoding antimicrobial compounds. The BGCs prioritized in this way are further used for experimental work in the laboratory, which allows the development of methodology resulting in the production of novel antimicrobial compounds, the above-mentioned primary goal of the project NAfrAM.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз