Genomic and functional techniques to mine the microbiome for novel antimicrobials and antimicrobial resistance genes.

Abstract

Microbial communities contain diverse bacteria that play important roles in every environment. Advances in sequencing and computational methodologies over the past decades have illuminated the phylogenetic and functional diversity of microbial communities from diverse habitats. Among the activities encoded in microbiomes are the abilities to synthesize and resist small molecules, yielding antimicrobial activity. These functions are of particular interest when viewed in light of the public health emergency posed by the increase in clinical antimicrobial resistance and the dwindling antimicrobial discovery and approval pipeline, and given the intimate ecological and evolutionary relationship between antimicrobial biosynthesis and resistance. Here, we review genomic and functional methods that have been developed for accessing the antimicrobial biosynthesis and resistance capacity of microbiomes and highlight outstanding examples of their applications.