Growth and secondary metabolite production of a historical collection of Sorangium cellulosum.

Abstract

Epothilones are a novel class of microtubule stabilizers produced by the bacterium Sorangium cellulosum. Although distinct from paclitaxel (Taxol®), they possess a similar mode of action. Epothilones have several advantages as compared to Taxol®, which makes them the likely successors of Taxol®. Unfortunately, S. cellulosum is a very hard organism to work with and it produces only about 20 mg/L of epothilones. The isolation of S. cellulosum strains that overproduce epothilones woulci he a tremendous advantage to the production of these important compounds. Unfortunately, the production of epothilones among S. cellulosum strains is rare. Currently, the only way to determine if a strain produces epothilones is to grow the organism and examine extracts by mass spectrometry, a costly and time-consuming process. In this study, we developed culture conditions for the growth of S. cellulosum and prepared extracts of secondary metabolites from 45 different strains. Also, data are presented in the development of a PCR-based approach to the identification of the epothilone gene cluster.