Lysed areas suggestive of phage activity were observed on a plate in the course of isolation of a strain of Chondrococcus columnaris from trout at the Fisheries Center of the University of Washington. C. columnaris is an aquatic fruiting myxobacterium responsible for epizootics in salmonid and other fishes (Ordal and Rucker, 1944). Subsequently a bacteriophage was isolated which infected and ly...

In 1922 Davis described an infectious disease which was responsible for heavy mortalities in a number of species of warm water fishes in the Mississippi Valley. Although Davis was unsuccessful in his attempts to cultivate the etiological agent, he reported that large numbers of slender, motile bacteria were characteristically present in the lesions of infected fish. He further noted that when m...

Increasing antibiotic resistances of numerous pathogens mean that myxobacteria, well known producers of new antibiotics, are becoming more and more interesting. More than 100 secondary metabolites, most of them with bioactivity, were described from the order Myxococcales. Especially new myxobacterial genera and species turned out to be reliable sources for novel antibiotics and can be isolated ...

Although many secondary metabolites with diverse biological activities have been isolated from myxobacteria, most strains of these biotechnologically important gliding prokaryotes remain difficult to handle genetically. In this study we describe the new fast growing myxobacterial thermophilic isolate GT-2 as a heterologous host for the expression of natural product biosynthetic pathways isolate...