Streptomyces are soil-dwelling bacteria known as prolific producers of specialized metabolites important for medical and agricultural industries. Evidence gathered over the last decade has indicated that interspecies interactions can induce antibiotic production in actinomycetes. Specifically, previous work by the Traxler Group has shown that growing Streptomyces coelicolor next to other microbes triggered the production of prodiginine, a red antibiotic produced by S. coelicolor. Emerging strategies to find novel compounds propose coculturing streptomycetes with bacterial partners that induce metabolite production, but the regulatory systems modulating metabolite production during these interactions has remained enigmatic. My current work aims to identify and characterize the proteins involved in this novel type of bacterial regulation using co-culturing techniques, genetics, and analytical chemistry. Understanding the regulatory systems of such an important organism for industrial applications can help us improve yields, and give us access to unexplored chemical spaces such as lanthipeptide biochemistry, which could be hugely beneficial to medical and agricultural industries.
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