Bioprospecting for Bioactive Actinomycetes from Patagonia
Actinomycetes have been and still are the most promising bacterial source of antibiotic and antifungal substances. It is known that the genetic potential of these microorganisms has been underexplored. Up to date, almost all continents have been subject t
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Bioprospecting for Bioactive Actinomycetes from Patagonia María Soledad Vela Gurovic Abstract Actinomycetes have been and still are the most promising bacterial source of antibiotic and antifungal substances. It is known that the genetic potential of these microorganisms has been underexplored. Up to date, almost all continents have been subject to bioprospecting for bioactive actinomycetes. Reports on the screening of actinomycetes come mainly from Europe, India, and countries of Africa. In contrast, some biologically rich regions, particularly Patagonia and other regions from South America, have been scarcely explored. Bioprospecting based on the exploration of new environments, such as the deep sea and marine invertebrates, led to the discovery of new and unique bioactive metabolites. Patagonia offers a vast diversity of such potential environments and sources of bioactive strains, including autochthonous marine invertebrates, endemic plants and lichens, wide unoccupied desert areas with high-saline environments exposed to high temperatures, pristine environments, and ancient forests. The latest most successful approaches in bioprospecting for bioactive actinomycetes are reviewed in this chapter, together with a discussion of the available reports on bioprospecting for actinomycetes from Patagonia.
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Introduction
Actinomycetes comprise a large group of gram-positive bacteria. Although they are typically abundant in soil as saprophytic microorganisms, actinomycetes also inhabit freshwater and deep sea. Actinomycetes are the source of many clinically successful antibiotics. For decades, the isolation of bioactive metabolites from actinomycetes provided new hits for the treatment of infections and cancer, among other diseases. The discovery of many bioactive compounds from actinomycete cultures has revolutionized human medicine and other disciplines such as veterinary pharmacology and the food industry. Ivermectin is the best example to illustrate
M.S. Vela Gurovic (*) CERZOS UNS-CONICET CCT-Bahía Blanca, Camino La Carrindanga Km7 (B8000FWB), Bahía Blanca, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 N.L. Olivera et al. (eds.), Biology and Biotechnology of Patagonian Microorganisms, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42801-7_9
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this. The Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine 2015, Prof. Dr. Satoshi Omura, isolated the producing microorganism Streptomyces avermitilis from the soil near a golf course. Although the research on actinomycete metabolites was very successful in the past century, the discovery of new bioactive entities from natural sources declined over the years, although the frequency of rediscovering known metabolites increased (Baltz 2007). However, the prevailing criterion suggests that natural sources have not been depleted. Indeed, genomic and metagenomic studies showthat the metabolic potential of bacteria has been underestimated. In the past years, sequencing and annotation of bacterial genomes showed that many strains harbour te
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