Extremophilic marine microbiota as a source of siderophores and biosurfactants

Microorganisms are a prolific source of natural products and prospective micro-factories of bioactive compounds. Extremophilic microorganisms have recently gained prominence in natural products chemistry. Marine environments, characterised as such, harbour largely unknown microbiota, and possess great potential regarding the discovery of novel compounds with distinctive chemistry and bioactivity. A large and diverse group of marine-derived molecules are those known as biosurfactants and metallophores (chelators, mainly siderophores) have numerous applications across industries. A multifaceted study of several extremophilic bacterial strains from the genera Chromohalobacter, Marinospirillum and Halomonas (phylum: Pseudomonadota) was conducted as part of the ongoing SECRETed project. It included but was not limited to physiological investigations (optimal cultivation conditions), quantitative screening assays for detection of microbially-produced siderophores and biosurfactants and, protocol development for the extraction of biomasses and supernatants from liquid cultures, coupled with a high-throughput HPLC-HRMS dereplication method, reinforced by state-of-the-art cheminformatic approaches, aiming at detection of potentially novel compounds. Analyses of biomass extracts (obtained via a multi-step extraction using solvents of increasing polarity) and supernatant extracts (obtained via a multi-step XAD resins-assisted extraction) against specialised in-house libraries, demonstrated the presence of both groups in the rendered molecular networks, belonging to various chemical classes (e.g. lipopeptides and depsipeptides, fatty acid derivatives, pyranones, napthofurans, organosulfur compounds and glycosides). Interestingly, several clusters of biosurfactants and/or siderophores were found, including many unknown molecules sharing similar characteristics.

Funding SECRETed project was funded by the European Unionʼs Horizon2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 101000794).

Publikationsverlauf

Artikel online veröffentlicht:
16. November 2023