Omics Approach for the Analysis of Natural Products Produced by Streptomyces

Natural products are a large family of diverse chemical substances with a variety of biological activities used in biotechnology, agriculture, and medicine. About 50% of used drugs like antibiotics or siderophores originate from natural products. Living in soil, bacteria of the genus Streptomyces have a great potential for the production of useful bioactive natural products. Although many of the natural products produced by Streptomycetes are already known, the full biosynthetic potential of these organisms has yet to be exploited.
Therefore, the aim of my PhD project is the identification and characterization of novel natural products produced by Streptomyces isolates. To obtain a set of diverse and potentially novel natural product producers, streptomycetes are isolated from various soil samples. After isolation, the growth of the strains as well as production of siderophores and antibiotics is characterized. Additionally, to characterize the biosynthetic potential of the strains on the genome level, the genomes are subjected to Nanopore sequencing in cooperation with the group of Prof. Dr. Jörn Kalinowski at the CeBiTec in Bielefeld. Due to the comparison of the phenotypic and genotypic analysis, I aim to identify potentially new natural product producers for metabolomic analysis. For the generation of metabolomics data, the isolates will be grown under different cultivation conditions and culture supernatants analyzed by mass spectrometry to be compared using molecular networking. The combination of genomics and metabolomics allows the identification of new natural products, which will be further purified by using flash chromatography and structurally characterized using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.