NP discovery Flashcards
What are NP?
Secondary metabolites produced by a microorganism or plant. The soil is filled with actinomycete bacteria e.g. streptomyces which produce the most
Draw the life cycle of a filamentous bacteria
See diagram
When did Flemming discover Penicillin
Late 1920s
What has Penicillin been derived into?
Amoxicillin
What did Waksman discover?
Streptomycin
What is Streptomycin used to treat?
1st treatment for tuberculosis
Draw the Waksman platform
See diagram
When did the innovation gap start?
from the 1960s
What was the innovation gap?
When pharma pulled out due to rediscovery problems and the Waksman platform takes a lot of time and money. Started focusing on synthetic chemistry but this can lack complexity and chemical diversity
What is the NP renaissance?
Advancements in genome-mining, bioprospecting, bioengineering and activation of silent gene clusters
Types of genome sequencing platforms (short or long reads)
454 sequencing and Illumina (short reads)
PacBio (Longer reads)
Oxford nanopore - beta testing but allows real time
Tools for annotating the genome
BLAST
RAST
EMBL-EBI
What bioinformatics tool can be used to help find gene clusters?
antiSMASH
Draw antiSMASH pathway
See diagram
Genome mining- Antimycin/neoantimycin
Strep albus from leaf cutting ants was isolated and bioactivity aginst fungus
Grew up and separated on normal phase column into fractions
Bioassay of fractions showed two peaks
LCMS showed was antimycin and candicidin
No-one knew how antimycin was made
454 sequencing of genome and identified the biosyn gene cluster
The core of it looks like threonine suggest NRPS pathway so search for a threonine adenylation domain
Antimycin is produced by a NRPS/PKS hybrid
Mutations were made and the pathway solved
A lot of interest as inhibit BCL-XL which is overexpressed in cancers
Neoantimycin downregulates BiP - known about for a while
Did not know the pathway but similar in structure to antimycin - seq the producer and the pathway was identified (not using antiSMASH)
Strep orinocci couldn’t be genetically modified therefore was cloned into heterologous host - albus and the pathway was idenified
Which bacteria produced Antimycin/candicin
Strep albus