Global biogeographic sampling of bacterial secondary metabolism
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Rockefeller University, United States
- Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- University of São Paulo, Brazil
- Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, South Africa
- Nanjing Agricultural University, China
Abstract
Recent bacterial (meta)genome sequencing efforts suggest the existence of an enormous untapped reservoir of natural-product-encoding biosynthetic gene clusters in the environment. Here we use the pyro-sequencing of PCR amplicons derived from both nonribosomal peptide adenylation domains and polyketide ketosynthase domains to compare biosynthetic diversity in soil microbiomes from around the globe. We see large differences in domain populations from all except the most proximal and biome-similar samples, suggesting that most microbiomes will encode largely distinct collections of bacterial secondary metabolites. Our data indicate a correlation between two factors, geographic distance and biome-type, and the biosynthetic diversity found in soil environments. By assigning reads to known gene clusters we identify hotspots of biomedically relevant biosynthetic diversity. These observations not only provide new insights into the natural world, they also provide a road map for guiding future natural products discovery efforts.
Article and author information
Author details
Reviewing Editor
- Jon Clardy, Harvard Medical School, United States
Version history
- Received: October 5, 2014
- Accepted: January 7, 2015
- Accepted Manuscript published: January 19, 2015 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 13, 2015 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2015, Charlop-Powers et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Global biogeographic sampling of bacterial secondary metabolism
eLife 4:e05048.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05048
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