The majority of today’s antimicrobial therapeutics is derived from secondary metabolites produced by Actinobacteria. While it is generally assumed that less than 1% of Actinobacteria species from soil habitats have been cultivated so far, classic screening approaches fail to supply new substances, often due to limited throughput and frequent rediscovery of already known strains. To overcome the...

Dracaena cochinchinensis Lour. is an ethnomedicinally important plant used in traditional Chinese medicine known as dragon's blood. Excessive utilization of the plant for extraction of dragon's blood had resulted in the destruction of the important niche. During a study to provide a sustainable way of utilizing the resources, the endophytic Actinobacteria associated with the plant were explored...

The subject of this review is the biodiversity of marine sponges and associated microbes which have been reported to produce therapeutically important compounds, along with the contextual information on their geographic distribution. Class Demospongiae and the orders Halichondrida, Poecilosclerida and Dictyoceratida are the richest sources of these compounds. Among the microbial associates, mem...

Lake Vostok is the largest of the nearly 400 subglacial Antarctic lakes and has been continuously buried by glacial ice for 15 million years. Extreme cold, heat (from possible hydrothermal activity), pressure (from the overriding glacier) and dissolved oxygen (delivered by melting meteoric ice), in addition to limited nutrients and complete darkness, combine to produce one of the most extreme e...

Due to the increasing emergence of drug-resistant bacteria and tumor cell lines, novel antibiotics with antibacterial and cytotoxic activities are urgently needed. Marine actinobacteria are rich sources of novel antibiotics, and here we report the discovery of a novel alkaloid, xinghaiamine A, from a marine-derived actinomycete Streptomyces xinghaiensis NRRL B24674(T). Xinghaiamine A was purifi...

The majority of today's antimicrobial therapeutics is derived from secondary metabolites produced by Actinobacteria. While it is generally assumed that less than 1% of Actinobacteria species from soil habitats have been cultivated so far, classic screening approaches fail to supply new substances, often due to limited throughput and frequent rediscovery of already known strains. To overcome the...

The composition of the vaginal microbiota is an important health determinant. Several members of the phylum Actinobacteria have been implicated in bacterial vaginosis, a condition associated with many negative health outcomes. Here, we present 11 strains of vaginal Actinobacteria (now available through BEI Resources) along with draft genome sequences.

The role of RbpA in the backdrop of M. smegmatis showed that it rescues mycobacterial RNA polymerase from rifampicin-mediated inhibition (Dey et al., 2010; Dey et al., 2011). Paget and co-workers (Paget et al., 2001; Newell et al., 2006) have revealed that RbpA homologs occur exclusively in actinobacteria. Newell et al. (2006) showed that MtbRbpA, when complemented in a ∆rbpA mutant of S. coeli...

Newtown Creek is an industrial waterway and former tidal wetland in New York City. It is one of the most polluted water bodies in the United States and was designated as a superfund site in 2010. For over a century, organic compounds, heavy metals, and other forms of industrial pollution have disrupted the creek’s environment. The creek is also impacted by discharges from twenty combined sewer ...

The application of new probiotics is a good strategy in the biological control of infectious diseases in aquaculture. Approximately 100 marine actinobacteria isolates were obtained from 10 sediment samples of shrimp farms. Heat treatment of sediment samples resulted in a selective reduction of the non actinobacterial heterotrophic microflora. Starch nitrate agar medium exhibited more effic...