NAICONS Srl, 20139 Milan, Italy.
Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam, 1098 XH Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
J Ind Microbiol Biotechnol. 2021 Jun 4;48(3-4). doi: 10.1093/jimb/kuab017.
Natural products have provided many molecules to treat and prevent illnesses in humans, animals and plants. While only a small fraction of the existing microbial diversity has been explored for bioactive metabolites, tens of thousands of molecules have been reported in the literature over the past 80 years. Thus, the main challenge in microbial metabolite screening is to avoid the re-discovery of known metabolites in a cost-effective manner. In this perspective, we report and discuss different approaches used in our laboratory over the past few years, ranging from bioactivity-based screening to looking for metabolic rarity in different datasets to deeply investigating a single Streptomyces strain. Our results show that it is possible to find novel chemistry through a limited screening effort, provided that appropriate selection criteria are in place.
天然产物为人类、动物和植物的治疗和预防疾病提供了许多分子。虽然仅对微生物多样性的一小部分进行了生物活性代谢产物的探索，但在过去 80 年中，文献中已经报道了成千上万的分子。因此，微生物代谢产物筛选的主要挑战是以具有成本效益的方式避免已知代谢物的重复发现。在这篇观点文章中，我们报告并讨论了过去几年我们实验室使用的不同方法，从基于生物活性的筛选到在不同数据集寻找代谢稀有性，再到深入研究单个链霉菌菌株。我们的结果表明，通过有限的筛选工作有可能发现新的化学物质，前提是有适当的选择标准。
