The Library of Pseudoalteromonas

Abstract


 Natural products (NPs) are compounds that are produced by living things, like bacteria. These compounds are encoded by what are known as biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). A BGC is a set of genes that when all expressed, work together to form a particular NP. NPs are of extreme importance as they are used for many different medical applications, particularly as antibiotics. Since bacteria must evolve quickly to compete against one another for resources, it makes sense to turn to these organisms to find a solution for bacterial infections. The problem is that pathogenic bacteria have been evolving methods to fight antibiotics faster than we have been able to discover new ones. There is a great need to improve the natural product drug discovery pipeline. One way to do this is to change the conditions microbes grow in to have them express previously silent BGCs. In order to do this effectively, it is beneficial to have a strong baseline for molecules produced under standard conditions. Pseudoalteromonas is a relatively underexplored genus of marine bacteria. Thus, my goal is to catalogue the natural products produced by Pseudoalteromonas under standard culture conditions using Mass Spectrometry analysis. The starting point for this so-called Library Project has involved identifying existing natural product databases. The databases that have been explored can be classified into four categories that are also reflective of the order in which they will be used. These categories for the databases are: databases for culturing information, databases to catalog known natural products, mass spectrometry (MS) analysis tool-based databases, and databases that will associate novel natural products with BGCs. Now that the appropriate databases have been identified, the next step is to begin culturing and extracting from these microbes, to then run and analyze mass spectrums of these extracts.