NCCIH Lecture: Watch Your Step, There Is New Chemistry Everywhere

NCCIH Integrative Medicine Research Lecture The characterization of biologically active small molecules (natural products) produced by easily cultured bacteria has been a rewarding avenue for identifying novel therapeutics. The characterization of biologically active small molecules (natural products) produced by easily cultured bacteria has been a rewarding avenue for identifying novel therapeutics, as well as gaining insights into how bacteria interact with the world around them. Large-scale sequencing of bacterial genomic and metagenomic DNA indicates that the traditional pure culture – based approach to studying bacterial natural products has provided access only to a small fraction of the diverse metabolites encoded by environmental microbiomes. In particular, these studies suggest that in most environments, uncultured bacteria outnumber their cultured counterparts by at least two orders of magnitude. Although there appears to be no easy way to culture this collection of unstudied microorganisms, Dr. Brady has developed culture-independent methods to circumvent this discovery bottleneck. These methods involve the extraction, cloning, and heterologous expression of bacterial biosynthetic gene clusters directly from environmental samples. The speaker will discuss applying these methods to the identification of new antibiotics from the global soil microbiome as well as metabolites encoded by the human microbiome. Learning Objectives: 1.Discuss the identification of new an...
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