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Organisationseinheit der BAM
Microbial communities in the immediate environment of socialized invertebrates can help to suppress pathogens, in part by synthesizing bioactive natural products. Here we characterized the core microbiomes of three termite species (genus Coptotermes) and their nest material to gain more insight into the diversity of termite-associated bacteria.
Sampling a healthy termite colony over time implicated a consolidated and highly stable microbiome, pointing toward the fact that beneficial bacterial phyla play a major role in termite fitness. In contrast, there was a significant shift in the composition of the core microbiome in one nest during a fungal infection, affecting the abundance of wellcharacterized Streptomyces species (phylum Actinobacteria) as well as less-studied bacterial phyla such as Acidobacteria. High-throughput cultivation in microplates was implemented to isolate and identify these less-studied bacterial phylogenetic group.
Amplicon sequencing confirmed that our method maintained the bacterial diversity of the environmental samples, enabling the isolation of novel Acidobacteriaceae and expanding the list of cultivated species to include two strains that may define new species within the genera Terracidiphilus and Acidobacterium.
Bacterial infections are a global threat to human health1. Especially nosocomial infections with multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria challenge public health systems and endanger successful treatment of patients in many modern medicine applications as e.g. organ transplant. In the last three decades classical approaches failed to find novel chemical scaffolds suitable for the development of antibiotics that reach the market and caused the modern antibiotics crisis1.
Insect microbiomes produce potent antibiotics with low toxicity to eukaryotic cells to defend their hosts against entomopathogenic microorganisms2. In order to exploit insect microbiomes efficiently and to identify novel antibiotics producing bacteria, we implemented an ultra-high throughput Microfluidics/FACS (fluorescence-associated cell sorting) cultivation and screening pipeline. Here we present the technical aspects of our pipeline including downstream processing of identified producer strains and its suitability for antibiotics discovery.