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posted by martyb on Friday May 05 2017, @01:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the fights-MRSA-and-others dept.

Microbiologists often study microbes in isolation. In the scientific vernacular, this is called "pure culture." While this is necessary to understand how individual microbes work, the trouble with this approach is that microbes do not live by themselves in the natural environment. Instead, they live in communities with multiple other species, cooperating and competing in order to survive.

As a result, microbes can behave very differently in the environment compared to the artificial solitude of the laboratory. This insight has helped spur the field of microbial ecology, which studies microbial interactions with each other and the environment. One technique to do is "co-culture." Instead of growing microbes in isolation, they are grown in the presence of other organisms.

A team of scientists led by Andrea Stierle from the University of Montana has applied this technique to species of the fungus Penicillium, the same genus that produces the antibiotic penicillin. The researchers discovered that, when grown in co-culture, two different species of the fungus cooperate to synthesize an antibiotic that neither species produces when grown alone.

The species, called P. fuscum and P. camembertii/clavigerum, are extremophiles (i.e., microbes that love extreme environmental conditions) that the team isolated from the Berkeley Pit Lake, which is acidic and metal-rich. The fungi were grown in separate pure cultures as well as in co-culture, after which metabolites were extracted, isolated, and identified. The team noticed that unique molecules were present in co-culture that weren't found in the pure cultures.

Source: http://acsh.org/news/2017/05/01/two-fungal-species-cooperate-synthesize-antibiotic-11215

Abstract: Andrea A. Stierle, et al. "The Berkeleylactones, Antibiotic Macrolides from Fungal Coculture." J Nat Prod 80(4): 1150-1160. Published: 22-Mar-2017. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jnatprod.7b00133 (Full journal article is paywalled.)


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