A Whole-Cell Assay for Detection of Antibacterial Activity in Actinomycete Culture Supernatants.

Whole-cell antibacterial assays are particularly suitable for fast detection and semi-quantification of bioactivities in extracts or other solutions such as microbial culture supernatants. As Actinomycetales, including the members of the genus Streptomyces, are one of the most potent "suppliers" of antibiotics and other bioactive compounds, there is a strong interest in the development of useful assays enabling early identification of such valuable producers. Furthermore, such assays facilitate the screening of a large collection of clones for the detection of engineered "super-producers" that are essential for industrial manufacturing of the respective product.

Overview on Strategies and Assays for Antibiotic Discovery.

The increase in antibiotic resistance poses a major threat to global health. Actinomycetes, the Gram-positive bacteria of the order , are fertile producers of bioactive secondary metabolites, including antibiotics. Nearly two-thirds of antibiotics that are used for the treatment of bacterial infections were originally isolated from actinomycetes strains belonging to the genus .

Acyltransferases as Tools for Polyketide Synthase Engineering.

Polyketides belong to the most valuable natural products, including diverse bioactive compounds, such as antibiotics, anticancer drugs, antifungal agents, immunosuppressants and others. Their structures are assembled by polyketide synthases (PKSs). Modular PKSs are composed of modules, which involve sets of domains catalysing the stepwise polyketide biosynthesis.

Metabolic engineering of antibiotic factories: new tools for antibiotic production in actinomycetes.

Actinomycetes are excellent sources for novel bioactive compounds, which serve as potential drug candidates for antibiotics development. While industrial efforts to find and develop novel antimicrobials have been severely reduced during the past two decades, the increasing threat of multidrug-resistant pathogens and the development of new technologies to find and produce such compounds have again attracted interest in this field. Based on improvements in whole-genome sequencing, novel methods have been developed to identify the secondary metabolite biosynthetic gene clusters by genome mining, to clone them, and to express them in heterologous hosts in much higher throughput than before.