Fueling Future Antibiotic Discovery: An Analysis of Taxonomic and Biosynthetic Diversity in Antimicrobial-Producing Soil Bacterial Isolates
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32473/ufjur.27.138789Keywords:
soil bacteria, antibiotic discovery, biosynthetic gene clusters, phylogenetic diversityAbstract
More than 80% of clinical antibiotics are compounds produced by soil bacteria, and there are many more unknown pathogen-inhibiting compounds encoded by clusters of co-localized genes (i.e., biosynthetic gene clusters) in soil bacterial genomes. To find novel antimicrobial drug candidates using a genome-level approach, biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) can be identified and compared against a database of known BGCs to infer what secondary metabolite(s) may be encoded. This study aims to uncover the diversity of these BGCs and characterize evolutionary patterns of BGC distribution across a phylogeny of 305 soil-derived bacterial isolates. BGCs were predicted through antiSMASH and taxonomic classification was conducted via GTDB-tk. OrthoFinder was used to perform a multi-locus sequence analysis and phylogenetic tree construction. The results of this investigation, an annotated phylogeny with mapped BGC data, will provide future antibiotic discovery researchers with deeper genetic insight into the biosynthetic potential and evolutionary patterns of BGCs for the investigated bacterial strains.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Neha Kashyap, Andrés Cumsille, Murrel Saldanha, José DD Cediel Becerra, Martel DenHartog, Jo Handelsman, Marc Chevrette
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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