Cloning large natural product gene clusters from the environment: piecing environmental DNA gene clusters back together with TAR.

ABSTRACT: A single gram of soil can contain thousands of unique bacterial species, of which only a small fraction is regularly cultured in the laboratory. Although the fermentation of cultured microorganisms has provided access to numerous bioactive secondary metabolites, with these same methods it is not possible to characterize the natural products encoded by the uncultured majority. The heterologous expression of biosynthetic gene clusters cloned from DNA extracted directly from environmental samples (eDNA) has the potential to provide access to the chemical diversity encoded in the genomes of uncultured bacteria. One of the challenges facing this approach has been that many natural product biosynthetic gene clusters are too large to be readily captured on a single fragment of cloned eDNA. The re

SUBMITTER: Kim JH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2895911 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature