Ultrasonic Imaging for Microbial Natural Products in Agriculture

Soils harbor a tremendous diversity of bacteria that serve as reservoirs for natural products beneficial to agriculture. The majority of soil bacteria are not cultivable under standard laboratory conditions using petri plates and liquid broth cultures. Two decades ago, the rise of metagenomics liberated researchers interested in natural product discovery from the constraints of microbial cultivation but innovative methods to identify bacteria capable of small molecule production are still lacking. We propose a proof-of-concept study on the application of ultrasonic chip imaging for high throughput natural product discovery based on screening of a 100kb soil metagenomic library.