Due to excessive use of antibiotics, bacteria are rapidly becoming resistant to many of these drugs. The development of new antibiotics is critical, as it is estimated antimicrobial resistant infections will kill up to 10 million people per year by 2050. The bacterial genus Streptomyces has been the original source of over two-thirds of currently available antibiotics. In order to discover new antibiotics, Streptomyces samples were isolated from a soil sample taken from the University of Texas at Austin. Tested for their ability to produce antibiotics, isolate U.E.2 produced a secreted compound(s) that inhibited strains of Pseudomonas and Arthrobacter while isolate N.P.1 inhibited strains of Bacillus, Pseudomonas, Rhodococcus, and Arthrobacter. In order to purify and identify the molecules responsible for this inhibition, whole cultures of each isolate were extracted with ethyl acetate, and the extracts were tested for antimicrobial activity using the same inhibition assay. The ethyl acetate extracts of each isolate produced the same results. Extracts were separated using TLC and LCMS in an attempt to identify the antibiotic. An agar overlay of N.P.1’s TLC verified the antimicrobials produced are present in one spot, though the antibiotic activity of TLC spots remains undetermined in U.E.2. HPLC will be performed as an alternative separation technique for N.P.1 extracts and fractions tested for antimicrobial activity. Work with these isolates could lead to the discovery of a novel antibiotic or contribute to the understanding of antibiotic production necessary to mitigate the crisis of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Identification of potentially novel antimicrobial molecules produced by isolated Streptomycetes

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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