Rhodococcus bacteria as a source of novel antibiotics

在过去的25年里，新抗生素的发现率直线下降。在同一时期，由于对目前已知的许多抗生素的抗药性细菌迅速上升，这一问题变得更加复杂。目前，在医学、农业和兽医治疗中用于治疗细菌感染的大多数抗生素来自细菌链霉菌属。人们希望其他放线菌属，如红球菌，具有与链霉菌相同的能力。这个项目的想法是将红球菌作为新抗生素的来源，因为它们也是放线菌，并且具有与链霉菌相似的遗传潜力，这可能表明存在抗菌化合物的产生。链霉菌中的调控系统最近被描述出来，人们相信在红球菌基因组中也发现了类似的系统。这项研究的目的是了解最终导致发育的红球菌途径的调节。

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