GoFish: A versatile nested PCR strategy for environmental DNA assays for marine vertebrates.

Here we describe GoFish, a strategy for single-species environmental DNA (eDNA) presence/absence assays using nested PCR. The assays amplify a mitochondrial 12S rDNA segment with vertebrate metabarcoding primers, followed by nested PCR with M13-tailed, species-specific primers. Sanger sequencing confirms positives detected by gel electrophoresis. We first obtained 12S sequences from 77 fish specimens for 36 northwestern Atlantic taxa not well documented in GenBank. Using these and existing 12S records, we designed GoFish assays for 11 bony fish species common in the lower Hudson River estuary and tested seasonal abundance and habitat preference at two sites. Additional assays detected nine cartilaginous fish species and a marine mammal, bottlenose dolphin, in southern New York Bight. GoFish sensitivity was equivalent to Illumina MiSeq metabarcoding. Unlike quantitative PCR (qPCR), GoFish does not require tissues of target and related species for assay development and a basic thermal cycler is sufficient. Unlike Illumina metabarcoding, indexing and batching samples are unnecessary and advanced bioinformatics expertise is not needed. From water collection to Sanger sequencing results, the assay can be carried out in three days. The main limitations to this approach, which employs metabarcoding primers, are the same as for metabarcoding, namely, inability to distinguish species with shared target sequences and inconsistent amplification of rarer eDNA. In addition, the performance of the 20 assays reported here as compared to other single-species eDNA assays is not known. This approach will be a useful addition to current eDNA methods when analyzing presence/absence of known species, when turnaround time is important, and in educational settings.

Culture-independent discovery of the malacidins as calcium-dependent antibiotics with activity against multidrug-resistant Gram-positive pathogens.

Despite the wide availability of antibiotics, infectious diseases remain a leading cause of death worldwide 1 . In the absence of new therapies, mortality rates due to untreatable infections are predicted to rise more than tenfold by 2050. Natural products (NPs) made by cultured bacteria have been a major source of clinically useful antibiotics. In spite of decades of productivity, the use of bacteria in the search for new antibiotics was largely abandoned due to high rediscovery rates2,3. As only a fraction of bacterial diversity is regularly cultivated in the laboratory and just a fraction of the chemistries encoded by cultured bacteria are detected in fermentation experiments, most bacterial NPs remain hidden in the global microbiome. In an effort to access these hidden NPs, we have developed a culture-independent NP discovery platform that involves sequencing, bioinformatic analysis and heterologous expression of biosynthetic gene clusters captured on DNA extracted from environmental samples. Here, we describe the application of this platform to the discovery of the malacidins, a distinctive class of antibiotics that are commonly encoded in soil microbiomes but have never been reported in culture-based NP discovery efforts. The malacidins are active against multidrug-resistant pathogens, sterilize methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus skin infections in an animal wound model and did not select for resistance under our laboratory conditions.

Bacterial natural product biosynthetic domain composition in soil correlates with changes in latitude on a continent-wide scale.

Although bacterial bioactive metabolites have been one of the most prolific sources of lead structures for the development of small-molecule therapeutics, very little is known about the environmental factors associated with changes in secondary metabolism across natural environments. Large-scale sequencing of environmental microbiomes has the potential to shed light on the richness of bacterial biosynthetic diversity hidden in the environment, how it varies from one environment to the next, and what environmental factors correlate with changes in biosynthetic diversity. In this study, the sequencing of PCR amplicons generated using primers targeting either ketosynthase domains from polyketide biosynthesis or adenylation domains from nonribosomal peptide biosynthesis was used to assess biosynthetic domain composition and richness in soils collected across the Australian continent. Using environmental variables collected at each soil site, we looked for environmental factors that correlated with either high overall domain richness or changes in the domain composition. Among the environmental variables we measured, changes in biosynthetic domain composition correlate most closely with changes in latitude and to a lesser extent changes in pH. Although it is unclear at this time the exact mix of factors that may drive the relationship between biosynthetic domain composition and latitude, from a practical perspective the identification of a latitudinal basis for differences in soil metagenome biosynthetic domain compositions should help guide future natural product discovery efforts.

Aquatic environmental DNA detects seasonal fish abundance and habitat preference in an urban estuary.

The difficulty of censusing marine animal populations hampers effective ocean management. Analyzing water for DNA traces shed by organisms may aid assessment. Here we tested aquatic environmental DNA (eDNA) as an indicator of fish presence in the lower Hudson River estuary. A checklist of local marine fish and their relative abundance was prepared by compiling 12 traditional surveys conducted between 1988-2015. To improve eDNA identification success, 31 specimens representing 18 marine fish species were sequenced for two mitochondrial gene regions, boosting coverage of the 12S eDNA target sequence to 80% of local taxa. We collected 76 one-liter shoreline surface water samples at two contrasting estuary locations over six months beginning in January 2016. eDNA was amplified with vertebrate-specific 12S primers. Bioinformatic analysis of amplified DNA, using a reference library of GenBank and our newly generated 12S sequences, detected most (81%) locally abundant or common species and relatively few (23%) uncommon taxa, and corresponded to seasonal presence and habitat preference as determined by traditional surveys. Approximately 2% of fish reads were commonly consumed species that are rare or absent in local waters, consistent with wastewater input. Freshwater species were rarely detected despite Hudson River inflow. These results support further exploration and suggest eDNA will facilitate fine-scale geographic and temporal mapping of marine fish populations at relatively low cost.

Biotechnological potential of Actinobacteria from Canadian and Azorean volcanic caves.

Caves are regarded as extreme habitats with appropriate conditions for the development of Actinobacteria. In comparison with other habitats, caves have not yet been the target of intensive screening for bioactive secondary metabolites produced by actinomycetes. As a primary screening strategy, we conducted a metagenomic analysis of the diversity and richness of a key gene required for non-ribosomal peptide (NRP) biosynthesis, focusing on cave-derived sediments from two Canadian caves (a lava tube and a limestone cave) to help us predict whether different types of caves may harbor drug-producing actinobacteria. Using degenerate PCR primers targeting adenylation domains (AD), a conserved domain in the core gene in NRP biosynthesis, a number of amplicons were obtained that mapped back to biomedically relevant NRP gene cluster families. This result guided our culture-dependent sampling strategy of actinomycete isolation from the volcanic caves of Canada (British Columbia) and Portugal (Azores) and subsequent characterization of their antibacterial and enzymatic activities. Multiple enzymatic and antimicrobial activities were identified from bacterial of the Arthrobacter and Streptomyces genera demonstrating that actinomycetes from volcanic caves are promising sources of antibacterial, antibiofilm compounds and industrially relevant enzymes.

Urban park soil microbiomes are a rich reservoir of natural product biosynthetic diversity.

Numerous therapeutically relevant small molecules have been identified from the screening of natural products (NPs) produced by environmental bacteria. These discovery efforts have principally focused on culturing bacteria from natural environments rich in biodiversity. We sought to assess the biosynthetic capacity of urban soil environments using a phylogenetic analysis of conserved NP biosynthetic genes amplified directly from DNA isolated from New York City park soils. By sequencing genes involved in the biosynthesis of nonribosomal peptides and polyketides, we found that urban park soil microbiomes are both rich in biosynthetic diversity and distinct from nonurban samples in their biosynthetic gene composition. A comparison of sequences derived from New York City parks to genes involved in the biosynthesis of biomedically important NPs produced by bacteria originally collected from natural environments around the world suggests that bacteria producing these same families of clinically important antibiotics, antifungals, and anticancer agents are actually present in the soils of New York City. The identification of new bacterial NPs often centers on the systematic exploration of bacteria present in natural environments. Here, we find that the soil microbiomes found in large cities likely hold similar promise as rich unexplored sources of clinically relevant NPs.

Discovery of MRSA active antibiotics using primary sequence from the human microbiome.

Here we present a natural product discovery approach, whereby structures are bioinformatically predicted from primary sequence and produced by chemical synthesis (synthetic-bioinformatic natural products, syn-BNPs), circumventing the need for bacterial culture and gene expression. When we applied the approach to nonribosomal peptide synthetase gene clusters from human-associated bacteria, we identified the humimycins. These antibiotics inhibit lipid II flippase and potentiate ß-lactam activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in mice, potentially providing a new treatment regimen.

Multiplexed CRISPR/Cas9- and TAR-Mediated Promoter Engineering of Natural Product Biosynthetic Gene Clusters in Yeast.

The use of DNA sequencing to guide the discovery of natural products has emerged as a new paradigm for revealing chemistries encoded in bacterial genomes. A major obstacle to implementing this approach to natural product discovery is the transcriptional silence of biosynthetic gene clusters under laboratory growth conditions. Here we describe an improved yeast-based promoter engineering platform (mCRISTAR) that combines CRISPR/Cas9 and TAR to enable single-marker multiplexed promoter engineering of large gene clusters. mCRISTAR highlights the first application of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to multiplexed promoter engineering of natural product biosynthetic gene clusters. In this method, CRISPR/Cas9 is used to induce DNA double-strand breaks in promoter regions of biosynthetic gene clusters, and the resulting operon fragments are reassembled by TAR using synthetic gene-cluster-specific promoter cassettes. mCRISTAR uses a CRISPR array to simplify the construction of a CRISPR plasmid for multiplex CRISPR and a single auxotrophic selection to improve the inefficiency of using a CRISPR array for multiplex gene cluster refactoring. mCRISTAR is a simple and generic method for multiplexed replacement of promoters in biosynthetic gene clusters that will facilitate the discovery of natural products from the rapidly growing collection of gene clusters found in microbial genome and metagenome sequencing projects.

Yeast homologous recombination-based promoter engineering for the activation of silent natural product biosynthetic gene clusters.

Large-scale sequencing of prokaryotic (meta)genomic DNA suggests that most bacterial natural product gene clusters are not expressed under common laboratory culture conditions. Silent gene clusters represent a promising resource for natural product discovery and the development of a new generation of therapeutics. Unfortunately, the characterization of molecules encoded by these clusters is hampered owing to our inability to express these gene clusters in the laboratory. To address this bottleneck, we have developed a promoter-engineering platform to transcriptionally activate silent gene clusters in a model heterologous host. Our approach uses yeast homologous recombination, an auxotrophy complementation-based yeast selection system and sequence orthogonal promoter cassettes to exchange all native promoters in silent gene clusters with constitutively active promoters. As part of this platform, we constructed and validated a set of bidirectional promoter cassettes consisting of orthogonal promoter sequences, Streptomyces ribosome binding sites, and yeast selectable marker genes. Using these tools we demonstrate the ability to simultaneously insert multiple promoter cassettes into a gene cluster, thereby expediting the reengineering process. We apply this method to model active and silent gene clusters (rebeccamycin and tetarimycin) and to the silent, cryptic pseudogene-containing, environmental DNA-derived Lzr gene cluster. Complete promoter refactoring and targeted gene exchange in this "dead" cluster led to the discovery of potent indolotryptoline antiproliferative agents, lazarimides A and B. This potentially scalable and cost-effective promoter reengineering platform should streamline the discovery of natural products from silent natural product biosynthetic gene clusters.

phylogeo: an R package for geographic analysis and visualization of microbiome data.

MOTIVATION: We have created an R package named phylogeo that provides a set of geographic utilities for sequencing-based microbial ecology studies. Although the geographic location of samples is an important aspect of environmental microbiology, none of the major software packages used in processing microbiome data include utilities that allow users to map and explore the spatial dimension of their data. phylogeo solves this problem by providing a set of plotting and mapping functions that can be used to visualize the geographic distribution of samples, to look at the relatedness of microbiomes using ecological distance, and to map the geographic distribution of particular sequences. By extending the popular phyloseq package and using the same data structures and command formats, phylogeo allows users to easily map and explore the geographic dimensions of their data from the R programming language. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: phylogeo is documented and freely available http://zachcp.github.io/phylogeo CONTACT: : zcharlop@rockefeller.edu.

Multiplexed metagenome mining using short DNA sequence tags facilitates targeted discovery of epoxyketone proteasome inhibitors.

In molecular evolutionary analyses, short DNA sequences are used to infer phylogenetic relationships among species. Here we apply this principle to the study of bacterial biosynthesis, enabling the targeted isolation of previously unidentified natural products directly from complex metagenomes. Our approach uses short natural product sequence tags derived from conserved biosynthetic motifs to profile biosynthetic diversity in the environment and then guide the recovery of gene clusters from metagenomic libraries. The methodology is conceptually simple, requires only a small investment in sequencing, and is not computationally demanding. To demonstrate the power of this approach to natural product discovery we conducted a computational search for epoxyketone proteasome inhibitors within 185 globally distributed soil metagenomes. This led to the identification of 99 unique epoxyketone sequence tags, falling into 6 phylogenetically distinct clades. Complete gene clusters associated with nine unique tags were recovered from four saturating soil metagenomic libraries. Using heterologous expression methodologies, seven potent epoxyketone proteasome inhibitors (clarepoxcins A-E and landepoxcins A and B) were produced from these pathways, including compounds with different warhead structures and a naturally occurring halohydrin prodrug. This study provides a template for the targeted expansion of bacterially derived natural products using the global metagenome.

Global biogeographic sampling of bacterial secondary metabolism.

Recent bacterial (meta)genome sequencing efforts suggest the existence of an enormous untapped reservoir of natural-product-encoding biosynthetic gene clusters in the environment. Here we use the pyro-sequencing of PCR amplicons derived from both nonribosomal peptide adenylation domains and polyketide ketosynthase domains to compare biosynthetic diversity in soil microbiomes from around the globe. We see large differences in domain populations from all except the most proximal and biome-similar samples, suggesting that most microbiomes will encode largely distinct collections of bacterial secondary metabolites. Our data indicate a correlation between two factors, geographic distance and biome-type, and the biosynthetic diversity found in soil environments. By assigning reads to known gene clusters we identify hotspots of biomedically relevant biosynthetic diversity. These observations not only provide new insights into the natural world, they also provide a road map for guiding future natural products discovery efforts.

eSNaPD: a versatile, web-based bioinformatics platform for surveying and mining natural product biosynthetic diversity from metagenomes.

Environmental Surveyor of Natural Product Diversity (eSNaPD) is a web-based bioinformatics and data aggregation platform that aids in the discovery of gene clusters encoding both novel natural products and new congeners of medicinally relevant natural products using (meta)genomic sequence data. Using PCR-generated sequence tags, the eSNaPD data-analysis pipeline profiles biosynthetic diversity hidden within (meta)genomes by comparing sequence tags to a reference data set of characterized gene clusters. Sample mapping, molecule discovery, library mapping, and new clade visualization modules facilitate the interrogation of large (meta)genomic sequence data sets for diverse downstream analyses, including, but not limited to, the identification of environments rich in untapped biosynthetic diversity, targeted molecule discovery efforts, and chemical ecology studies. eSNaPD is designed to generate a global atlas of biosynthetic diversity that can facilitate a systematic, sequence-based interrogation of nature's biosynthetic potential.

Metagenomic small molecule discovery methods.

Metagenomic approaches to natural product discovery provide the means to harvest bioactive small molecules synthesized by environmental bacteria without the requirement of first culturing these organisms. Advances in sequencing technologies and general metagenomic methods are beginning to provide the tools necessary to unlock the unexplored biosynthetic potential encoded by the genomes of uncultured environmental bacteria. Here, we highlight recent advances in sequence-based and functional-based metagenomic approaches that promise to facilitate antibiotic discovery from diverse environmental microbiomes.

Chemical-biogeographic survey of secondary metabolism in soil.

In this study, we compare biosynthetic gene richness and diversity of 96 soil microbiomes from diverse environments found throughout the southwestern and northeastern regions of the United States. The 454-pyroseqencing of nonribosomal peptide adenylation (AD) and polyketide ketosynthase (KS) domain fragments amplified from these microbiomes provide a means to evaluate the variation of secondary metabolite biosynthetic diversity in different soil environments. Through soil composition and AD- and KS-amplicon richness analysis, we identify soil types with elevated biosynthetic potential. In general, arid soils show the richest observed biosynthetic diversity, whereas brackish sediments and pine forest soils show the least. By mapping individual environmental amplicon sequences to sequences derived from functionally characterized biosynthetic gene clusters, we identified conserved soil type-specific secondary metabolome enrichment patterns despite significant sample-to-sample sequence variation. These data are used to create chemical biogeographic distribution maps for biomedically valuable families of natural products in the environment that should prove useful for directing the discovery of bioactive natural products in the future.

Mapping gene clusters within arrayed metagenomic libraries to expand the structural diversity of biomedically relevant natural products.

Complex microbial ecosystems contain large reservoirs of unexplored biosynthetic diversity. Here we provide an experimental framework and data analysis tool to facilitate the targeted discovery of natural-product biosynthetic gene clusters from the environment. Multiplex sequencing of barcoded PCR amplicons is followed by sequence similarity directed data parsing to identify sequences bearing close resemblance to biosynthetically or biomedically interesting gene clusters. Amplicons are then mapped onto arrayed metagenomic libraries to guide the recovery of targeted gene clusters. When applied to adenylation- and ketosynthase-domain amplicons derived from saturating soil DNA libraries, our analysis pipeline led to the recovery of biosynthetic clusters predicted to encode for previously uncharacterized glycopeptide- and lipopeptide-like antibiotics; thiocoraline-, azinomycin-, and bleomycin-like antitumor agents; and a rapamycin-like immunosuppressant. The utility of the approach is demonstrated by using recovered eDNA sequences to generate glycopeptide derivatives. The experiments described here constitute a systematic interrogation of a soil metagenome for gene clusters capable of encoding naturally occurring derivatives of biomedically relevant natural products. Our results show that previously undetected biosynthetic gene clusters with potential biomedical relevance are very common in the environment. This general process should permit the routine screening of environmental samples for gene clusters capable of encoding the systematic expansion of the structural diversity seen in biomedically relevant families of natural products.

Selective enrichment of environmental DNA libraries for genes encoding nonribosomal peptides and polyketides by phosphopantetheine transferase-dependent complementation of siderophore biosynthesis.

The cloning of DNA directly from environmental samples provides a means to functionally access biosynthetic gene clusters present in the genomes of the large fraction of bacteria that remains recalcitrant to growth in the laboratory. Herein, we demonstrate a method by which complementation of phosphopantetheine transferase deletion mutants can be used to restore siderophore biosynthesis and to therefore selectively enrich eDNA libraries for nonribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) and polyketide synthase (PKS) gene sequences to unprecedented levels. The common use of NRPS/PKS-derived siderophores across bacterial taxa makes this method generalizable and should allow for the facile selective enrichment of NRPS/PKS-containing biosynthetic gene clusters from large environmental DNA libraries using a wide variety of phylogenetically diverse bacterial hosts.

Natural product biosynthetic gene diversity in geographically distinct soil microbiomes.

The number of bacterial species estimated to exist on Earth has increased dramatically in recent years. This newly recognized species diversity has raised the possibility that bacterial natural product biosynthetic diversity has also been significantly underestimated by previous culture-based studies. Here, we compare 454-pyrosequenced nonribosomal peptide adenylation domain, type I polyketide ketosynthase domain, and type II polyketide ketosynthase alpha gene fragments amplified from cosmid libraries constructed using DNA isolated from three different arid soils. While 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis indicates these cloned metagenomes contain DNA from similar distributions of major bacterial phyla, we found that they contain almost completely distinct collections of secondary metabolite biosynthetic gene sequences. When grouped at 85% identity, only 1.5% of the adenylation domain, 1.2% of the ketosynthase, and 9.3% of the ketosynthase alpha sequence clusters contained sequences from all three metagenomes. Although there is unlikely to be a simple correlation between biosynthetic gene sequence diversity and the diversity of metabolites encoded by the gene clusters in which these genes reside, our analysis further suggests that sequences in one soil metagenome are so distantly related to sequences in another metagenome that they are, in many cases, likely to arise from functionally distinct gene clusters. The marked differences observed among collections of biosynthetic genes found in even ecologically similar environments suggest that prokaryotic natural product biosynthesis diversity is, like bacterial species diversity, potentially much larger than appreciated from culture-based studies.

Paramecium bursaria chlorella virus 1 encodes a polyamine acetyltransferase.

Paramecium bursaria chlorella virus 1 (PBCV-1), a large DNA virus that infects green algae, encodes a histone H3 lysine 27-specific methyltransferase that functions in global transcriptional silencing of the host. PBCV-1 has another gene a654l that encodes a protein with sequence similarity to the GCN5 family histone acetyltransferases. In this study, we report a 1.5 Å crystal structure of PBCV-1 A654L in a complex with coenzyme A. The structure reveals a unique feature of A654L that precludes its acetylation of histone peptide substrates. We demonstrate that A654L, hence named viral polyamine acetyltransferase (vPAT), acetylates polyamines such as putrescine, spermidine, cadaverine, and homospermidine present in both PBCV-1 and its host through a reaction dependent upon a conserved glutamate 27. Our study suggests that as the first virally encoded polyamine acetyltransferase, vPAT plays a possible key role in the regulation of polyamine catabolism in the host during viral replication.

Structural insights into selective histone H3 recognition by the human Polybromo bromodomain 2.

The Polybromo (PB) protein functions as a key component of the human PBAF chromatin remodeling complex in regulation of gene transcription. PB is made up of modular domains including six bromodomains that are known as acetyl-lysine binding domains. However, histone-binding specificity of the bromodomains of PB has remained elusive. In this study, we report biochemical characterization of all six PB bromodomains' binding to a suite of lysine-acetylated peptides derived from known acetylation sites on human core histones. We demonstrate that bromodomain 2 of PB preferentially recognizes acetylated lysine 14 of histone H3 (H3K14ac), a post-translational mark known for gene transcriptional activation. We further describe the molecular basis of the selective H3K14ac recognition of bromodomain 2 by solving the protein structures in both the free and bound forms using X-ray crystallography and NMR, respectively.