Since the first discovery of antibiotics from microorganisms, the use of bacteria as a source of chemical diversity has provided a wide number of natural products with both a broad array of biological activities and unique scaffolds and/or novel mechanisms of action. However, in recent decades the number of new antibacterial agents approved for clinical use has declined sharply. Coupled with an increase in prevalence of resistant pathogenic strains in hospital settings, this has become a significant crisis for the global healthcare community. In the field of natural products, Actinobacteria, as a main source of natural products, have been the most well studied family, providing numerous novel antibacterial agents to overcome the antibiotic resistance. However, increasing instances of rediscovery of common scaffolds suggests that there is a diminishing return to the continued use of the same discovery strategies in the face of rising antibiotic resistance. Recent genomic evidence suggests that there are a significant number of natural products clusters in Proterobacteria, still unexplored reservoirs of natural products diversity. The Burkholderia genus, being part of this phylum, has been recognized to contain a substantial number of clusters encoding putatively novel natural products, but to date has not been well studied. Since there are few efficient methods to isolate Burkholderia species from environmental sources, this project aims to develop a new isolation method using genomic, metagenomic and metabolic information to take advantage of unique properties of Burkholderia metabolism. This approach relies on examination of important metabolic properties, including antibiotic resistance, metal resistance, as well as the carbon and nitrogen metabolism profiles from Burkholderia and untargeted species in bacterial communities. Thus, this strategy can generate the possibility to construct a differential culture media to access this genus in diverse types of environmental samples. Ultimately, the objective of this research program is to examine environmental samples of the genus Burkholderia in order to discover next-generation antibiotics with unique molecular architectures and biological modes of action for the treatment of drug resistant infections.

New strategy to access the Burkholderia diversity from environmental samples

248th National Meeting (2014)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.