Genome Mining in Bacilli: Connecting New Biosynthetic Pathways with Phenotypes

Though often over-shadowed by their more prolific cousins, the actinomycetes, bacilli have long been outstanding sources of novel bioactive compounds.  In the genomic revolution, the profound metabolic capabilities of bacilli are coming fully to light, with particular respect to production of bacteriocins and other peptide-derived natural products.  Herein we describe two comparative genomics strategies, subsequently employed to identify singularly unique or else common, but as yet undiscovered natural product clusters from this prolific microorganism.  Access to nearly 1000 public and private bacillus genomes (from cereus, subtitllus, thuringiensis, and others) makes these informatics efforts possible, while the genetic plasticity of bacilli facilitates further elicitation and discovery of the newly predicted compounds.