S165: Culture independent approaches for the discovery of new bacterial metabolites

One of the key revelations to arise from the large-scale sequencing of bacterial genomic DNA is that traditional approaches used for the discovery of natural products only provide functional access to a small fraction of the natural product biosynthetic gene clusters present in nature.  The sequencing of DNA extracted directly from soil samples indicates that as yet uncultured soil microbes outnumber their cultured counterparts by at least two orders of magnitude.  This uncultured majority no doubt produces secondary metabolites that could serve as molecular probes of biological processes and therapeutic agents.  Uncultivated microorganisms are an attractive source of potentially new natural products.  We are using both functional and sequence-based screening strategies to access new natural products from large environmental DNA libraries.  New Metabolites, gene clusters and metagenomic methods will be discussed.