Abstract
In the twenty-first century, approximately 100 years since the discovery and use of the first drug penicillin, antimicrobial resistance has become the major global threat to human health, thereby, demanding the need to discover new candidate metabolites exhibiting therapeutic potential to meet current medical treatment demands. Newer emerging diseases, relatively long duration of discovery and development process of drugs among others also necessitate identification of novel drug candidates. Till date thousands of drugs have been discovered, two thirds of which have their origins from the culturable microbes present in soil or diverse habitats around the globe. Since the advancements in high-throughput technologies in genomics, it has become possible to discover novel candidate metabolites having therapeutic potential from complete microbiomes chosen in a culture independent manner leading to an exponential increase in novel drug discoveries. The present chapter, thus, aims to bring to focus the role of metagenomics—a biotechnological tool that involves extraction of DNA from communities of microbial populations circumventing the need of culturing the organism followed subsequently by screening and/or sequencing of DNA—in drug discovery. The chapter will begin with a background of drugs including microbial-derived ones followed by a section on various approaches currently available for drug discovery from microbes. This will lead to the field of metagenomics, various techniques involved and how metagenomics of microbes can help bioprospect their potential to synthesize drugs as well as how metagenomics can assist in selection of microbes having the ability to synthesize drugs of higher therapeutic potential.
All authors have contributed equally to the chapter formulation.
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Jethwa, A., Bhagat, J., George, J.T., Shah, S. (2023). Metagenomics for Drug Discovery. In: Kulkarni, S., Haghi, A.K., Manwatkar, S. (eds) Novel Technologies in Biosystems, Biomedical & Drug Delivery. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5281-6_6
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