Shy fungi | new drugs: functional elucidation of unassigned biosynthetic pathways for novel natural products

Summary

Our project concerns antimicrobial resistance. More and more multi-resistant bacteria emerge every year. These bacteria are resistant to most or even all antibiotics that are used in clinics, which poses a threat to public health. It is important to keep discovering structurally novel biologically active molecules that can be further developed into new antibiotics that bacteria don not have a resistance for.
Fungi are a great and unexploited source of such molecules, with the famous example of the antibiotic penicillin that was isolated from a mold. We used genomics to explore the potential of fungi to produce biologically active molecules, and utilized generated knowledge to rationally discover new bioactive compounds, potential antibiotics. For this, we used bioinformatics to assess the genomes of fungi for promising biosynthetic pathways. Next, we transferred this knowledge to the laboratory, where we biologically programmed fungal strains to produce chemicals, we evaluated their biological activity and identified a new antimicrobial compound.