Olga Genilloud
Fundacion Medina, Spain
Title: Exploiting bacterial diversity for the discovery of novel natural products
Biography
Biography: Olga Genilloud
Abstract
MEDINA is a non-profi t research center focused on the discovery of novel drug candidates from microbial natural productsrnand one of the richest and most diverse microbial collections currently in expansion. Th is microbial collection harbors morernthan 116.000 strains from a wide diversity of environments and is at the origin of our collaborative discovery research programs.rnOne of our objectives is to enrich these collections with new and diverse strains from untapped environments, and to continue tornexploit the existing microbial collection through culture-based approaches in order to succeed in maximizing the chemical diversityrnof our libraries. Our research in microbial natural products is focused on the isolation and identifi cation of novel microbial speciesrnwith the potential to produce novel compounds with biological activity to be developed as potential new leads to respond to unmetrnmedical needs. Despite the eff orts to diversify the microbial sources, it is well known that only a small fraction of microbial speciesrnhave been investigated, and that a large diversity of microbial sources remains largely underexplored, opening new avenues for thernisolation of new strains previously not cultivated. MEDINA is also exploring novel approaches to mine the so-called microbial darkrnmatter and is isolating and domesticating in laboratory culture conditions new taxa previously reported only from metagenomicrnlibraries. A selection of success cases that support the approaches developed in our center will be discussed.
