Myxobacteria: natural pharmaceutical factories

Microbial Cell Factories

Commentary

Jordi Mestres¹  Florenz Sasse²  Ronald Frank²  Andreas Meyerhans³  Javier P Martinez³  Juana Diez⁴ 

[1] Chemogenomics Laboratory, Research Program on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), IMIM-Hospital del Mar Research Institute and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain;Department of Chemical Biology, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Braunschweig, Germany;ICREA Infection Biology Group, Department of Experimental and Health Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain;Molecular Virology Group, Department of Experimental and Health Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain;

关键词: Myxobacteria;    Natural products;    Drug discovery;    Chemical space;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1475-2859-11-52

 received in 2012-03-24, accepted in 2012-04-30,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

Myxobacteria are amongst the top producers of natural products. The diversity and unique structural properties of their secondary metabolites is what make these social microbes highly attractive for drug discovery. Screening of products derived from these bacteria has revealed a puzzling amount of hits against infectious and non-infectious human diseases. Preying mainly on other bacteria and fungi, why would these ancient hunters manufacture compounds beneficial for us? The answer may be the targeting of shared processes and structural features conserved throughout evolution.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Diez et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.