期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:2017
卷号:114
期号:44
页码:11615-11620
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1710262114
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:Although bacterial bioactive metabolites have been one of the most prolific sources of lead structures for the development of small-molecule therapeutics, very little is known about the environmental factors associated with changes in secondary metabolism across natural environments. Large-scale sequencing of environmental microbiomes has the potential to shed light on the richness of bacterial biosynthetic diversity hidden in the environment, how it varies from one environment to the next, and what environmental factors correlate with changes in biosynthetic diversity. In this study, the sequencing of PCR amplicons generated using primers targeting either ketosynthase domains from polyketide biosynthesis or adenylation domains from nonribosomal peptide biosynthesis was used to assess biosynthetic domain composition and richness in soils collected across the Australian continent. Using environmental variables collected at each soil site, we looked for environmental factors that correlated with either high overall domain richness or changes in the domain composition. Among the environmental variables we measured, changes in biosynthetic domain composition correlate most closely with changes in latitude and to a lesser extent changes in pH. Although it is unclear at this time the exact mix of factors that may drive the relationship between biosynthetic domain composition and latitude, from a practical perspective the identification of a latitudinal basis for differences in soil metagenome biosynthetic domain compositions should help guide future natural product discovery efforts.