Omics for bioprospecting and drug discovery from bacteria and microalgae

“Omics” represent a combinatorial approach to high-throughput analysis of biological entities for various purposes. It broadly encompasses genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, lipidomics, and metabolomics. Bacteria and microalgae exhibit a wide range of genetic, biochemical and concomitantly, physiological variations owing to their exposure to biotic and abiotic dynamics in their ecosystem conditions. Consequently, optimal conditions for adequate growth and production of useful bacterial or microalgal metabolites are critically unpredictable. Traditional methods employ microbe isolation and ‘blind’-culture optimization with numerous chemical analyses making the bioprospecting process laborious, strenuous, and costly. Advances in the next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have offered a platform for the pan-genomic analysis of microbes from community and strain downstream to the gene level. Changing conditions in nature or laboratory accompany epigenetic modulation, variation in gene expression, and subsequent biochemical profiles defining an organism’s inherent metabolic repertoire. Proteome and metabolome analysis could further our understanding of the molecular and biochemical attributes of the microbes under research. This review provides an overview of recent studies that have employed omics as a robust, broad-spectrum approach for screening bacteria and microalgae to exploit their potential as sources of drug leads by focusing on their genomes, secondary metabolite biosynthetic pathway genes, transcriptomes, and metabolomes. We also highlight how recent studies have combined molecular biology with analytical chemistry methods, which further underscore the need for advances in bioinformatics and chemoinformatics as vital instruments in the discovery of novel bacterial and microalgal strains as well as new drug leads

Complete genome sequence data of Priestia megaterium strain MARUCO02 isolated from marine mangrove-inhabited sediments of the Indian Ocean in the Bagamoyo Coast

Priestia is a genus of biotechnologically important bacteria adapted to thrive in a wide range of environmental conditions including the marine sediments. Here, we screened and isolated a strain from the Bagamoyo marine mangrove-inhabited sediments and then employed whole genome sequencing to recover and define its full genome. De novo-assembly with Unicycler (v. 0.4.8) and annotation with Prokaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline (PGAP) revealed that that its genome contains one chromosome (5,549,131 bp), with a GC content of 37.62%. Further analysis showed that the genome contains 5,687 coding sequences (CDS), 4 rRNAs, 84 tRNAs, 12 ncRNAs, and at least 2 plasmids (1,142 bp and 6,490 bp). On the other hand, antiSMASH-based secondary metabolite analysis revealed that the novel strain (MARUCO02) contains gene clusters for biosynthesis of MEP-DOXP-dependent versatile isoprenoids (eg. carotenoids), siderophores (synechobactin and schizokinen) and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA). The genome dataset also informs about the presence genes encoding enzymes required for generation of hopanoids, compounds that confer adaption to harsh environmental conditions including industrial cultivation recipes. Our data from this novel Priestia megaterium strain MARUCO02 can be used for reference and in genome-guided selection of strains for production of isoprenoids as well as industrially useful siderophores and polymers, amenable for biosynthetic manipulations in a biotechnological process