Discovery of phosphonic acid natural products by mining the genomes of 10,000 actinomycetes.

Although natural products have been a particularly rich source of human medicines, activity-based screening results in a very high rate of rediscovery of known molecules. Based on the large number of natural product biosynthetic genes in microbial genomes, many have proposed "genome mining" as an alternative approach for discovery efforts; however, this idea has yet to be performed experimentally on a large scale. Here, we demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale, high-throughput genome mining by screening a collection of over 10,000 actinomycetes for the genetic potential to make phosphonic acids, a class of natural products with diverse and useful bioactivities.

Use of Foodborne Disease Data for HACCP Risk Assessment.

Methodological limitations in the way foodborne disease data are analyzed and reported nationally make it difficult to use it for Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) risk assessment. This warranted the creation of a new system of classification and analysis. Foodborne disease data from reported outbreaks in New York State (NYS) between the years 1980-1991 (1,528 outbreaks involving 31,675 cases) were reviewed to develop two new categories by which foodborne disease vehicles were classified: Method of Preparation and Significant Ingredient.