This viewpoint discusses limitations of sample collection and microbial strain library generation practices, and will offer suggestions to innovate these areas.
The fluorometric emission scanning (using excitation at 405 nm) of plasma samples, simply diluted five-fold in phosphate-buffered saline, allows the differentiation of three conditions according to their porphyrin content. The emission maximum at 626-628 nm is a specific finding in variegate porphyria, while in erythropoietic protoporphyria a characteristic peak is found at 636 nm. A fluorescence emission maximum at 618-622 nm corresponds to a third group that includes normal subjects, non-porphyria patients and patients suffering from acute intermittent porphyria, hereditary coproporphyria, congenital erythropoietic porphyria (Günther disease) and porphyria cutanea tarda. Therefore, this simple, quick and cheap screening test allows one to establish whether a patient with a photocutaneous syndrome has porphyria and whether this porphyria belongs to the types: variegate, protoporphyria or other cutaneous porphyrias.
Microbial drug discovery programs rely heavily on accessing bacterial diversity from the environment to acquire new specialized metabolite (SM) lead compounds for the therapeutic pipeline. Therefore, knowledge of how commonly culturable bacterial taxa are distributed in nature, in addition to the degree of variation of SM production within those taxa, is critical to informing these front-end discovery efforts and making the overall sample collection and bacterial library creation process more efficient. In the current study, we employed MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry and the bioinformatics pipeline IDBac to analyze diversity within phylotype groupings and SM profiles of hundreds of bacterial isolates from two Eunapius fragilis freshwater sponges, collected 1.5 km apart. We demonstrated that within two sponge samples of the same species, the culturable bacterial populations contained significant overlap in approximate genus-level phylotypes but mostly nonoverlapping populations of isolates when grouped lower than the level of genus. Further, correlations between bacterial phylotype and SM production varied at the species level and below, suggesting SM distribution within bacterial taxa must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. Our results suggest that two E. fragilis freshwater sponges collected in similar environments can exhibit large culturable diversity on a species-level scale, thus researchers should scrutinize the isolates with analyses that take both phylogeny and SM production into account to optimize the chemical space entering into a downstream bacterial library.
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