Award Details:
Award Type: Catalyst
Award #: C-104
Proposal Title: Establishing Two New Bacterial Phyla to Produce the Next Generation of Biomedical Drug Leads
PI(s): Neil Kelleher (NU) and Brian Murphy (UIC)
Award Amount: $250,000.00
Application Cycle: Round 30 (Spring 2021)
Award Start Date: October 1, 2021
Award End Date: September 30, 2023
Abstract:
Most bacteria cultivated to date can be classified into just 5 of greater than 100 known phyla (Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Cyanobacteria, and Bacteroidetes). Natural product (NP) drug discovery efforts have focused almost exclusively on these and as a result, the rate of discovery of new compounds has dropped significantly over the last few decades. Two additional phyl —Acidobacteria and Planctomycetes—are found frequently throughout terrestrial and aquatic environments and genomic evidence suggests that they are rich in NP biosynthetic genes. Despite being readily cultivable by microbiologists, few researchers with NP discovery expertise have studied these phyla. Herein, we will employ high-throughput cultivation to build a pilot library of Acidobacteria and Planctomycetes, and employ proteomic, metabolomic, and genomic analyses to establish these phyla as new sources of distinct NP chemical space. This precedent will represent a major shift in the current drug discovery paradigm and position our team for large scale mining efforts via NIH funding.