Many life-threatening infectious diseases could now be cured by a few doses of antibiotics. In the 1970s, cyclosporin was isolated from a fungus and is now widely used to prevent rejection during organ transplant operations.
Penicillin and cyclosporin belong to a class of molecules called ‘secondary metabolites’. These compounds are amongst the most important natural products for human health and are made by tiny biosynthetic factories (encoded by gene clusters) inside bacteria and fungi.
Funded by a Marsden Fast-Start grant, Dr Jeremy Owen from Victoria University of Wellington's School of Biological Sciences, working with Dr Sean Brady from the Rockefeller University in the United States, will use ‘metagenomic’ methods to discover gene clusters that produce potentially medically important compounds.
This approach differs from 20th century methods, which involved culturing bacteria and fungi and purifying compounds. Drs Owen and Brady will extract DNA directly from New Zealand soils, and then look for the gene clusters.
Because most fungi and bacteria cannot be cultured in the lab, bypassing the culturing step opens up a treasure trove of new organisms and their secondary metabolites. After making a library of these gene clusters, the researchers will then persuade a common laboratory bacterium to produce the compounds.
The new compounds will be screened for biomedical properties such as antibiotic or anti-cancer activity.
Dr Jeremy Owen has been awarded funding of $300,000.