Metagenomic-Guided Antibiotics Discovery

Abstract

The extensive emergence of multi-drug-resistance pathogens e.g., New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NMD-1) Gram-negative bacteria cause a huge threat to public health. One direct course of action to treat drug-resistant pathogenic infections and avoid an epidemic is to discover new antibiotics [1]. However, during the past 50 years of intensive screening, the pace of antibiotic discovery and development with unique scaffolds is dramatically declining. Since the alreadydiscovered antibiotics are still high-frequency isolated and rapid dereplication techniques for antibiotics are still lacking, the major pharmaceutical companies have noticeably downsized their investment in antibiotic discovery, even stopped doing research in this area [2]. Accordingly, to meet the urgent demand for novel drug, a recent trend in antibiotic discovery from natural sources emphasizes the investigation of metagenomics.