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Natural Product Biosynthesis In Uncultured Bacteria, Jeffrey Kim

Student Theses and Dissertations

A single gram of soil can contain thousands of unique bacterial species, only a small fraction of which is regularly cultured in the laboratory.Although the fermentation of cultured microorganisms has provided access to numerous bioactive secondary metabolites, with these same methods it is not possible to characterize the natural products encoded by the uncultured majority. The heterologous expression of biosynthetic gene clusters cloned from DNA extracted directly from environmental samples (eDNA) has begun to provide access to the chemical diversity encoded in the genomes of previously uncultured bacteria. The systematic exploration of natural product biosynthesis in uncultured bacteria, however, still …