Harnessing Seagrass Rhizosphere Microbiome for New Antimicrobials

Today the drug discovery pipelines are lacking of novel compounds to combat challenging infections caused by multidrug resistant bacteria (MDR).

According to the World Health Organization, maintaining an intensive academic effort towards the discovery and development of new antimicrobials is urgently needed.

Bioprospecting for new antibiotics sourced from untapped environments, such as marine ecosystems, is of vital importance. As such, seagrass meadows represent an emblematic marine ecosystem and a niche for understudied marine microorganisms. While much is known about the rhizosphere microbiomes of terrestrial plants, little is known about the seagrass ones.

This project raises two questions: What is the seagrass microbiome and its antimicrobial metabolites? and, are these molecules naturally produced and secreted in the rhizosphere?

Taking advantage of the host institutions expertise within natural products chemistry, microbiology, biochemistry and genomics the four objectives of SeaRhi are: (1) to create a microbial strain collection of microorganisms associated with the seagrass rhizosphere, (2) to discover new microbial metabolites and characterize their biosynthesis (3) to systematically evaluate their antimicrobial properties against MDR bacteria, and (4) to determine if the (anti)microbial metabolites are produced in the ecosystem.

SeaRhi will address technical challenges using innovative strategies to study marine microorganisms directly in their ecological niche by developing cutting-edge in situ devices to isolate marine microorganisms and collect the molecules they produced and released in environmental conditions.

Thanks to an interdisciplinary ecosystem-focused strategy and the integration of knowledge between the fields of engineering, microbiology, marine natural product chemistry and (meta)genomic, SeaRhi will provide a better understanding of the seagrass ecosystem while discovering new antibacterial microbial metabolites.