The use of fosmid metagenomic libraries in preliminary screening for various biological activities

Microbial Cell Factories

Research

Sylwia Bloch¹  Agnieszka Felczykowska¹  Małgorzata Bohdanowicz¹  Grzegorz Węgrzyn¹  Aleksandra Dydecka¹  Bożena Nejman-Faleńczyk¹  Tomasz Gąsior¹  Marek Soboň²  Justyna Kobos³ 

[1] Department of Molecular Biology, University of Gdañsk, Wita Stwosza 59, 80-308, Gdañsk, Poland;Department of Molecular Biology, University of Gdañsk, Wita Stwosza 59, 80-308, Gdañsk, Poland;Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Sciences, Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, Tr. A. Hlinku 2, 949 76, Nitra, Slovakia;Institute of Oceanography, University of Gdansk, Al. Marszałka Piłsudskiego 46, 81-378, Gdynia, Poland;

关键词: Metagenomic libraries;    Cyanobacteria;    Escherichia coli cell factories;    Bioactive compounds;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12934-014-0105-4

 received in 2014-07-07, accepted in 2014-07-11,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIt is generally believed that there are many natural sources of as yet unknown bioactive compounds with a high biotechnological potential. However, the common method based on the use of cell extracts in the preliminary screening for particular molecules or activities is problematic as amounts of obtained compounds may be low, and such experiments are hardly reproducible. Therefore, the aim of this work was to test whether a novel strategy to search for previously unknown biological activities can be efficient. This strategy is based on construction of metagenomic libraries and employment of Escherichia coli strains as cell factories producing compounds of properties potentially useful in biotechnology.ResultsThree cyanobacterial metagenomic libraries were constructed in the fosmid system. The libraries were screened for various biological activities. Extracts from selected E. coli clones bearing constructs with fragments of cyanobacterial genomes revealed antimicrobial or anticancer activities. Interestingly, stimulation of growth of host bacteria bearing particular plasmids with certain cyanobacterial genes was detected, suggesting a potential possibility for improvement of E. coli cultivation during biotechnological production. The most interesting plasmids were sequenced, and putative mechanisms of biological effects caused by cyanobacterial gene products are discussed.ConclusionsThe strategy of exploring cyanobacteria as sources of bioactive compounds, based on E. coli cell factories producing compounds due to expression of genes from metagenomic libraries, appears to be effective.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Felczykowska et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2014. 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/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.