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Antimicrobials: Expressing antibiotic gene clusters

Nature Microbiology volume 2, Article number: 17061 (2017) Cite this article

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Bacterial specialized metabolites are bioactive molecules with antibacterial or other activities that are of tremendous clinical use. New work has revealed that transcript elongation is a distinct and widespread point of secondary metabolic gene regulation, which has implications for expanding drug discovery.

Bacteria produce a diverse array of ‘specialized’ metabolites using distinct biosynthetic pathways encoded in large clusters of genes, which are frequently organized in very long operons (the largest known cluster is greater than 210,000 base pairs1). Many of these loci encode clinically valuable antibiotics, and as such there is interest in characterizing these gene clusters and identifying novel bioactive molecules.

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Figure 1: Transcriptional regulation of secondary metabolite synthesis loci.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Justin R. Nodwell is in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Toronto, 661 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M5G 1M1, Canada.,

    Justin R. Nodwell

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  1. Justin R. Nodwell
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Correspondence to Justin R. Nodwell.

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The author declares no competing financial interests.

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Nodwell, J. Antimicrobials: Expressing antibiotic gene clusters. Nat Microbiol 2, 17061 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmicrobiol.2017.61

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmicrobiol.2017.61

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