Eat Dirt: Researchers Are Mining Soil In Search Of Miracle Drugs

BERKELEY, CA — When you consider that penicillin was discovered in mold, this research by UC Berkeley may not be that surprising — scientists are prospecting in dirt to find the next generation of antibiotics. And their efforts so far have uncovered a wealth of potentially life-saving drugs.

The researchers are using metagenomics, meaning that they are sequencing the genomes of every microbe in a teaspoon of soil. That's significant, according to UC Berkeley's Robert Sanders, because it has found "hundreds of genes for complex and potentially useful molecules that would not have been found otherwise because the microbes cannot be grown in a petri dish...The genes, many from previously unknown groups of bacteria, likely produce antibiotics or antifungals that the microbes make to defend themselves and which may also be able to combat bacterial or fungal infections in humans."

The soil samples were taken from a meadow north of San Francisco, in Mendocino County. The 60 samples were sequenced at the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute. The DOE has an ongoing study focused on carbon cycling in soil. Researchers estimate that the sequenced genomes represent between 20 and 40 percent of all the microbes in the soil samples.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of antibiotic resistant infections.

"We expect to find novel antibiotics, which could help humanity, but also novel pharmaceuticals more broadly," said Jill Banfield, UC Berkeley professor and program lead for the microbiology component of the campus’s Innovative Genomics Institute. "Soil is the last frontier from the perspective of genome-resolved metagenomics."

Read more about the research in the science journal Nature.

-Image by Jill Banfield used with permission of UC Berkeley

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