Genetic libraries unearthed from the soil

Some of the most useful medicines in the health-care arsenal are derived from soil-dwelling microbes. But the preponderance of microbes that make their home in the dirt are little known to science because they cannot be tamed and grown in the laboratory.

Now, a team of scientists from the university has patented a means of bypassing the untamable soil microbe by tapping directly into the genes responsible for producing chemicals of value to medicine such as antibiotics and growth inhibitors.

The technique works by subjecting wild soil microbes to freezing and heat before cracking them open, and extracting the long sequences of DNA that may code for a useful drug or chemical. Already, vast libraries of genetic information have been catalogued, and one potential new antibiotic has been discovered.

The technology promises a new way of mining nature for useful substances, according to UW–Madison biologists Jo Handelsman and Robert Goodman, and may soon be applied to other environments – such as the insect gut – where numerous microbes and their potentially useful chemicals reside.