UC San Diego

The goal of this study was to test the effectiveness of phylogenetics as a method of predicting secondary metabolite production. A phylogeny of 27 strains of tropical marine cyanobacteria from 5 geographic locations was constructed based on the SSU (16S) rRNA gene. Evolutionary relationships among the strains were used to predict their production of several known natural products. Two strains from Curac̦ao were successfully predicted to produce dolastatin 12 and tumonoic acid B based on secondary metabolite production by related strains, while a morphologically similar but evolutionarily more distant strain from the same geographic location was correctly predicted to not produce these compounds. However, a strain from Panama that was closely related to the dolastatin 12 and tumonoic acid producers did not produce these compounds. This suggests that while evolutionary relatedness can be a useful tool for predicting secondary metabolite production, it is possible that environmental factors affect production of specific compounds. With this in mind, a phylogeny-guided approach is still an effective method of finding existing bioactive compounds of interest, and possibly new natural analogs of those compounds