Aerobiotics: Toward the Discovery of New Antibiotics From Airborne Actinomycetes

• Published in: The FASEB journal Vol. 32; no. S1; p. 656.24
• Main Authors: Hudgens, Zachary, Wickard, Aaron, Nealon, Christopher, Sweet, Charles
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology 01-04-2018
• ISSN: 0892-6638; 1530-6860
• DOI: 10.1096/fasebj.2018.32.1_supplement.656.24

In the last decade the rising prevalence of multi‐drug resistant (MDR) infections such as Staphylococcus, Acinetobacter, Klebsiella, Mycobacterium, and others have made bacterial illnesses increasingly difficult to treat. Resistant bacterial infection could kill millions in the coming decades ‐ surpassing cancer in mortality ‐ and in September 2016 a woman in the United States died from Klebsiella pneumoniae resistant to all known antibiotics. The need is dire for new antimicrobial therapies, but developmental approaches over the last few decades have been slow to yield new drugs for reasons both scientific and economic. In response to this crisis we propose a return to the original well of natural product discovery, isolating new antibiotics from actinomycete bacteria in the aerobiome. To facilitate the discovery of novel antibiotic metabolites in these organisms, a collection of air‐harvested isolate cultures within the order Actinomycetales has been curated at the US Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC). This collection is sourced from lower atmosphere biosampling conducted by several institutions, including the United States Naval Academy (USNA). To date the ECBC screen has identified 43 organisms with novel antimicrobial bioactivity, and promising members of this collection are under study at USNA in a target‐agnostic isolation and characterization scheme using HPLC and affinity column purification, bioactivity assays, and spectral characterization. In this work we demonstrate the isolation and partial purification of antimicrobial activities secreted into liquid culture by several of these bacteria, including a broad‐spectrum activity against both Gram‐positive and Gram‐negative tester strains.
Support or Funding Information
Funding for this study was provided by the Office of Naval Research Midshipman Research Program and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency grant CB10171.
This is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this published in The FASEB Journal.