A new approach for exploiting microbial new strain resources for drug screening / 国际药学研究杂志

Generally absolute majority of wild-type microbial strains do not produce bioactive metabolites, resulting in large numbers of so-called 'useless strains' stocked or destroyed. These strains, however, would become a great source of bioactive meabolites if their secondary metabolism could be altered to produce diverse metabolites. We have therefore undertaken a research work on exploiting microbial new strain resources for drug screening by altering secondary metabolism of the 'useless strains' to discover bioactive metabolites. A considerable progress with expectant advantage desired has been made in the studies on marine-derived actinomycetic and fungal strains. This paper summarizes our research results including several new developments in brief.

Screening for bioactive mutants with antitumor activity from an actinomycetic wild-type strain without antitumor activity by antibiotic-resistant mutation technique and by coupled with chemical mutagen-induced mutation / 军事医学科学院院刊

Objective To obtain antibiotic-resistant mutants producing metabolites with antitumor activity from wild-type actinomycete strains without antitumor activity. Methods An actinomycete strain L35-1 was used as an initial strain for obtaining antibiotic-resistant mutants, which is a marine-derived wild-type strain without antitumor activity with an inhibition rate of 2.8% at the 1000 μg/ml of high sample concentration on K562 cells. The antibiotic-resistant mutants both from auto-mutagenesis and chemical mutagen-induced mutagenesis were selected by single colony isolation on antibiotic-containing plates according to the method for obtaining drug-resistant mutants in ribosome engineering. The antitumor activity was assayed by the MTT method using K562 cells for the mutants with aqueous acetone extracts of the whole broth of their fermentation.Results A total of 114 neomycin-resistant (ner) and 68 streptomycin-resistant (str) mutants, all from auto-mutagenesis, was obtained on drug-containing plates. Among them, the 7 ner and 3 str mutants appeared to be bioactive with an inhibition rate above 20% at the 100 μg/ml sample concentration on K562 cells. On the other hand, 41 str and 32 ner mutants from DES-induced mutagenesis and 46 ner mutants from NTG-induced mutagenesis were obtained by mutagen-induced mutation coupled with the single colony isolation on antibiotic-containing plates, among which, one str mutant from DES-induced mutagenesis and one ner mutant from NTG-induced mutagenesis were bioactive with an inhibition rate over 20% at the 100 μg/ml sample concentration on K562 cells. Conclusions The present result has revealed that the wild-type actinomycete strains without bioactivity might become a great source initial strains to obtain bioactive mutants by drug-resistant mutation technique.