Rhodococcus bacteria as a source of novel antibiotics

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In the last 25 years the discovery rate of new antibiotics has plummeted. In the same time period, this problem has been compounded by the rapid rise of drug resistant bacteria for many of the antibiotics that are currently known. At the moment, the majority of the antibiotics that are used to treat bacterial infections in medicine, agriculture and veterinarian treatment originate from the bacterial genus Streptomyces. It is hoped that other actinomycetes genera such as Rhodococcus have the same capability as the Streptomyces. The idea of this project is to look at Rhodococcus bacteria as a source for novel antibiotics due to them also being actinomycetes and having analogous genetic potential to Streptomyces that may indicate the presence of antimicrobial compound production. The regulatory system in Streptomyces has recently been characterised and it is believed that there is an analogue of this found in the Rhodococcus genome. The aim of this study is to understand the regulation of the Rhodococcus pathways that will ultimately lead to the development