Microbispora sp. ATCC-PTA-5024 proteomic analysis to study metabolic pathway changes before and during lantibiotic production

The actinomycete Microbisporasp. ATCC‐PTA‐5024 produces the lantibiotic NAI-107 [1] which has been attracting the attention as a potential drug candidate. In fact, NAI-107 is active against vancomycinresistant Gram-positive pathogens and its in vivo efficacy was confirmed using animal models [2]. Although NAI-107 has a high potential as a therapeutic drug, the producer strain is only poorly characterized. Thus, high throughput studies may give some insights in order to investigate biochemical capability, metabolic pathways and regulation of NAI-107 production. Therefore, a comprehensive proteomic-based study was performed to unravel changes in global protein expression by comparing (Fig. 1): A) Microbispora wild type (WT) strain during producing and not-producing growth stages; B) WT and two Microbispora mutant strains, a super producer (SP) and a null mutant (NP) for production, respectively.