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DOI: 10.1055/s-0035-1556379
Prospecting Great Lakes bacteria for drug-lead discovery with high-throughput microbiome screening
Drug discovery ventures have focused on small molecule production from terrestrial actinomycete bacteria for nearly a century, and in the past few decades there has been a similar trend toward studies in the marine environment. Conversely, small molecule production from freshwater-derived actinomycete populations is virtually unexplored. To address this knowledge gap, systematic studies of freshwater actinomycete communities are needed to identify the capacity of these systems to afford both novel taxa and novel small molecules. As part of the current study, we contrasted sediment microbial communities between two of the interconnected Great Lakes (Lakes Huron and Michigan) using high-throughput amplicon sequencing to determine how actinomycete communities were structured with respect to environmental gradients, and if these communities differed significantly as a function of increasing collection depth and geographic location. In both lakes, significant differences in total bacterial and actinobacterial community structure were observed between sediments sampled from shallow and deep locations. Furthermore, by growing bacteria using different media types, we assessed what portion of the in situ community was accessible through cultivation, and whether it was possible to retrieve the actinomycete diversity observed from amplicon sequencing. Details of these studies will be presented.