Actinobacteria: Recent Trends in Genomics, Omics Study and Discovery of Novel Natural Products

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About this Research Topic

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Background

Since their introduction to therapy, anti-infectives have been the primary option for treating bacterial, fungal, parasitic and viral infections and have saved millions of lives. However, the insurgence of multi-resistance has become a worrying side-effect. In addition, as most of the antibiotic and antifungal drugs in the market are chemically synthesized or semi synthesized, adverse effects play a major role in causing serious diseases in humans and animals. Hence, the need to identify new natural products (NP´s) has become more significant in the last couple of years. The investigation and identification of novel compounds produced by microbes have shown their vast possibilities in an application, ranging from cancer treatment and management to drug-resistant bacterial infections, or immunosuppressive disorders. NP’s isolated from microbes present a significant proportion of pharmaceutical products in today’s drug market. Several natural environments are still completely unexplored regarding microorganisms, that could be used as potential candidates for future biotechnological applications.

Actinobacteria are among the most common groups of Gram-positive microorganisms with high GC content (more than 55%) in nature. They occur in both terrestrial and aquatic habitats and are well-known to produce antibiotics and other secondary metabolites of crucial importance in the pharmaceutical and agriculture industry. Recently, genome mining strategy has been described for exploring novel compounds, potentially as a source of new drugs. Actinobacteria are ideal candidates to test this approach for the screening of NPs with potential as new antimicrobial agents.

This Research Topic will provide a platform for researchers to describe the following:
- Genomics of NP’s producing actinobacteria from diverse natural habitats
- Novel bioactive compounds that can be produced by actinobacteria using the new omics tools; in particular: functional genomics, comparative genomics, proteomics, RNA-Seq, meta-transcriptomic, metabolomics, next-generation sequencing and heterologous expression of microorganisms isolated under diverse environmental conditions.

We welcome reviews, original research papers, new technology and methods articles. We encourage articles exploring a hypothesis or answering a question by omics methods. Descriptive articles on omics data, as well as manuscripts without a clear hypothesis-driven approach, will be considered out of scope.

Acknowledgment: The editors are thankful to Dr. Ajit Kumar Passari, PDF who has designed the proposal. Dr. Passari will assist to the editors as a project coordinator by reviewing relevant manuscripts as well as ensuring the authors will submit their manuscript before the deadlines.

Keywords: actinobacteria, natural product, heterologous expression, genome mining, transcriptomic, proteomes, metabolomes

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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