Many existing antibiotics were derived from soil bacteria, which naturally produce these toxins to ward off competitors. But efforts to draw more therapeutics from the ground have hit a snag. Most species cannot be grown in the lab, and even soil bacteria that can be cultured tend to keep their most promising toxins within the black box of a biosynthetic gene cluster—genes that function as a unit to collectively code for production of a molecule.
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Source: Phys.org