Dissertation
Environmental and metabolomic study of antibiotic production by actinomycetes
Promotor: Prof.dr. G.P. van Wezel
- Author
- H. Zhu
- Date
- 09 January 2014
- Links
- Thesis in Leiden Repository
This thesis may be regarded as a concept work, to see how feasible drug discovery approaches still are. For this, a strain collection was built up consisting of actinomycetes from soil in the Qinling and Himalaya mountains, which were subsequently tested for antibiotic production against multi-drug resistant clinical isolates. This resulted in close to 100 strains that showed strong antimicrobial activity, which were then analyzed in more detail. Two of the strains were subjected to extensive NMR-based metabolomics assisted by mass spectrometry, and several known and also novel antimicrobial compounds were elucidated. Finally, we also focused on the antibiotic activity of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).