Research Projects

Despite the historical success of many antibiotics between the golden age period (1940-70) from natural products of soil bacteria, research declined after 1970 owing to replication and difficulty in culturing unstudied bacteria species. In recent years, the interest in discovering new chemical entities, including novel classes of antibiotics from microbial natural products, is being revitalized by scientific advancement and improvement in many computational tools. For example, novel classes of antibiotics such as teixobactin (currently in clinical pipeline), clovibactin, malacidins, and platensimycin (undergoing in clinical pipeline) have been discovered from unstudied bacteria using soil metagenome mining or improved bacterial cultivation methods. The antibiotic biosynthetic potential of Indian soil is also remarkably evidenced by the discovery of a potent antibacterial and anticancer agent ‘Dynemicin A,” from the soil sample collected from Gujrat state of India by a Japanese research group. Further, potent antibacterial compounds such as picolinamycin and pyrimidomycin were also discovered from Streptomyces sp. isolated from the soil of the Eastern Himalaya foothill. This strongly suggests or indicates that understating the functionality of Indian soil culturable or unculturable bacteriome in relation to its antibiotic biosynthetic potential using genome or metagenome mining is crucial for aiding the current initiatives in sourcing new chemical entities in combating antimicrobial resistance. However, the distribution, diversity, or novelty of bacterial antibiotic biosynthetic gene clusters on a large geographical scale or diverse soil types in India has not yet been studied using bacterial genome or metagenome mining. The main aim of the proposed study is to uncover the distribution and diversity of the unexplored antibiotic biosynthetic gene clusters using the bacterial genome of metagenome mining of the soil bacteriome across the different soil types of geographical regions of India. The results of the proposed study will achieve novel insights into the antibiotic biosynthetic gene cluster landscape of the diverse soil types or geographical regions of India. This study holds great promise to offer a wealth of potential for antibiotic discovery efforts by academia or pharmaceutical firms