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

ABSTRACT: 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. Genome sequencing identified a diverse collection of phosphonate biosynthetic gene clusters within 278 strains. These cluster

SUBMITTER: Ju KS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4593130 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature