Metabolómica de compuestos antimicrobianos obtenidos de actinobacterias aisladas de avispas sociales

Antimicrobial resistance within a wide range of infectious agents is a public health threat of broad concern.
Resistance mechanism are transfer within microorganism accelerated, for this reason nowadays, some
pathogens are resistant to all kind of clinical use treatments. As consequence common infections and minor
injuries cannot be treated any more in some countries. Since 2014 World Health Organization warns about the
urgency of detecting new treatments from new sources, mainly antibiotics. Social insects have some features
in their social organization similar to human societies; making them key organisms to search for new antibiotics
metabolites. For example: they live in colonies with thousand or millions of individuals jammed together, in a
stable environment and accumulate waste. Despite some social insect as ants have been studied, Neotropical
Social Wasps (Epiponini) are unknow, as consequence, knowledge about antibiotic metabolites produce by
microorganisms associated to wasps is limited. For this reason, in 2017 and 2019 we executed two VIE
research projects in order to isolated actinobacteria from social wasp colonies and tested their antimicrobial
activity against different pathogens. As result of these research projects, we obtained actinobacteria from brood
cell and workers. This group of microorganisms is characterized for producing antibiotic metabolites. Also, 75%
of isolated strains suppress pathogen growth. After obtained the strains with antibiotic activity, the next stage
is to identify the metabolites produced to determine their potential to produce new medical treatments. For this
reason, we proposed another research project, which is still running up, in order to identified antibiotic
metabolites produce by strains that suppress pathogen growth, through genome analysis and bioinformatic
tools. In this research proposal we are going to use the information obtained from the projects we mentioned
before, to chemically characterized and identify the compounds produced by the strains with antibiotic activity.
We will use instrumental techniques like Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Liquid chromatography
coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC–HRMS) to characterize metabolites profile of actinobacteria
extracts. Obtain results will be important for the study of novel antibiotics and will contribute to understand
symbiotic relationships between microorganisms and social insects.

Caracterizar la producción de metabolitos secundarios con actividad antibiótica a partir de actinobacterias asociadas a avispas sociales.

Biotecnología Ambienta