Communication through specialized metabolism

The ecological context of microorganisms is an important player for inducing specialized metabolism thereby simultaneously providing information about the natural function of the biosynthesized molecule. Microbial strain collections contain a vast amount of bacteria displaying an immense potential for the discovery of pharmaceutically relevant specialized metabolites. However, their native interaction partners in soil as key to unlock their biosynthetic machineries are mostly unknown.

Our aim is to gain insights into the ecological context of isolated soil bacteria, particularly those too rare to show up in most metagenomics analyses and currently evading toolkits for their genetic manipulation. We are focusing on discovery of novel antiparasitic and antiinfective specialized metabolites in the context of potential signaling molecules secreted by other soil microbes for their induction. Besides microbiology-based approaches, we are applying multi-omix approaches including advanced mass spectrometry workflows to identify binders to particularly interesting target proteins and determine their specificity throughout kingdoms.