Learning From Nature: New Antibiotics Found In Our Body

It is known that all bacteria produce, among other things, small molecule chemicals, metabolites, as products of their living. Those products range in properties and biological activity, for example, some of them appear to be powerful antibiotics helping bacteria protect themselves from other microbes. The characterization of such products is a powerful tool, if not the most successful one, for identifying new small-molecule therapeutics. This is how we learn from nature.

In a typical experimental flow using this approach, scientists have to culture bacteria in labs and analyze metabolites to identify novel bioactive compounds. The limitation, however, arises from our inability to culture a majority of bacteria in the laboratory and from the fact that most biosynthetic gene clusters are not active under laboratory conditions, meaning they do not produce compounds they would do in a natural environment.

On the other hand, extensive sequencing of bacterial genomes and metagenomes has shown that the natural potential of the bacterial biosynthetic diversity is huge, compared to that small fraction that we can access in a lab.