Microbial natural products have been a vital source of drugs in the pharmaceutical industry. However, drug discovery efforts have shifted away from natural products due to high rediscovery rates and the growth of combinatorial chemistry. Despite this de-emphasis, the vast majority of microbial diversity remains unexplored and represents an untapped resource for therapeutic agents.  Hypogean ecosystems, such as caves, are ideal locations to search for biodiversity with the potential to produce novel natural products.  Bacteria in these hypercompetitive environments are likely to yield a variety of defensive, signaling, and predatory compounds with antibiotic properties. The actinomycetes, a class of gram-positive bacteria, are known producers of antibiotics, making them suitable targets for exploring the secondary metabolite potential of hypogean microbes.  In this work, actinomycetes strains isolated from four caves were identified based on 16s rRNA gene analysis to investigate their diversity in hypogean environments.  Actinomycetes were isolated using ex situ plate dilution methods as well as in situ traps selective for their characteristic mycelia growth.  Preliminary results indicate that the majority of the isolates belong to the Streptomyces genus.  The relatedness among the isolated Streptomyces strains will be determined.   Future work will entail screening rare actinomycetes for novel natural products with therapeutic properties.

Investigating actinomycete biodiversity in hypogean environments by 16s rDNA analysis

247th National Meeting (2014)

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