Secondary Metabolite Regulation And Drug-Lead Discovery From Aquatic Actinomycetes.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the field of natural products, drug discovery from the aquatic environment, and the development of Actinobacteria as a resource of drug-leads. Chapter 2 details one such effort that resulted in the isolation and structure elucidation of a novel macrolide marine natural product with potential chemopreventative bioactivity. Appendix I details the known molecules identified in the pursuit of novel natural products. As an alternative to the traditional drug discovery approach and in order to access secondary metabolites that are not normally expressed under laboratory conditions, we attempted to induce the expression of silent biosynthetic gene clusters via microbial co-culture; this is discussed in Chapter 3. The results presented have implications toward improving the drug discovery process by suggesting that it is possible to mine existing strain libraries for new natural products in a phylum specific manner. Lastly, Chapter 4 contains concluding remarks and future directions of the field of natural products.