Present and future outlooks on environmental DNA-based methods for antibiotic discovery

Bacillus subtilis as a host for natural product discovery and engineering of biosynthetic gene clusters

“…This typically involves iterative rounds of sequential serial dilution and PCR, a highly laborious task. 253 In this context, it is interesting to highlight a recently developed platform for plasmid library enrichment that combines microfluidics and droplet PCR. 254 Using this platform, each clone in a library can be individually interrogated for the presence of a target insert at a throughput of thousands per second, yielding a pool of purified and sequence-enriched plasmid DNA.…”

“…This has most convincingly and extensively been demonstrated by Sean Brady and colleagues, who have used degenerate primers and amplicon sequencing to identify previously unknown BGCs that assemble structurally distinct natural products with novel modes of action. 253,255 A well-known example is the discovery of the malacidins, relatively common calcium-dependent antibiotics that nevertheless were not previously discovered by culture-dependent methods. This distinctive class of antibiotics was identified using primers that target highly conserved NRPS domains.…”