"Soil microbes that have not yet been cultured outnumber their cultured counterparts by at least two to three orders of magnitude. Uncultured bacteria are one of the largest pools of genetic diversity that remain unexamined for the production of potentially useful natural products. Dr. Brady’s first research focus is the development of new strategies for studying genetically encoded small molecules produced by uncultured bacteria. Although most bacteria are not readily grown in the laboratory, making it difficult to use traditional microbiological methods to characterize the natural products they create, microbial DNA can be extracted directly from environmental samples and cloned in easily cultured bacteria. Dr. Brady has worked extensively on the development of genetic strategies to access the vast chemical and biosynthetic potential of uncultured, previously inaccessible, bacteria. This has allowed for the construction of large libraries of environmental DNA, as well as the development of methods to screen these libraries. Such culture-independent methods are leading Dr. Brady to identify new natural products, biosynthetic enzymes and bacterial signaling systems. Dr. Brady’s work has shown that large environmental DNA libraries are a promising source of both new derivatives of pharmacologically important classes of natural products as well as completely novel families of bioactive natural products. His group has begun mapping the presence of promising microbial gene clusters found in soil samples collected around the world. These maps may help guide the discovery of natural products by directing investigators to certain regions and environments. "
http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/labheads/SeanBrady/
This is just really cool research a friend of mine mentioned to me.
(Credit to EG)
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