Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Bacterial infections are a threat to the modern healthcare because of the increase of the antibiotic resistance that many bacteria have developed during the history of antibiotics that began with the discovery of penicillin 1928. In order to respond to the accumulating resistance, novel antibiotics have to be discovered constantly. Therefore, there is an increasing need to exploit the ability of microorganisms to produce secondary metabolites with an antimicrobial effect. The current report addresses methods to activate silent genes coupled to the production of secondary metabolites. These procedures involve usage of microbial culture media with various composition, different culturing conditions such as high or low oxygen level as wells as addition of previously reported supplements that may trigger the expression of silent metabolic pathways for novel antibiotics. The different approaches used affected the metabolite production both by activating or suppressing the observed antimicrobial effects and possibly also resulted in the production of previously not detected substances. Some of the obtained substances will be further investigated in order to determine their structure and putative antimicrobial effects in more detail.