Biocontrol capabilities of the genus Serratia
This review focuses on the production of natural bioactive products and their biocontrol capabilities of the enterobacterial genus Serratia. Serratia represents a unique group of enterobacteria with a notable secondary metabolism, able to produce a wide range of natural bioactive products including the b-lactam antibiotic carbapenem or the antifungal compound oocydin A. However, until very recently, most of the Serratia isolates originated from human and animal infections, and a systematic approach to the isolation of Serratia from natural habitats has been missing. The paucity of environmental isolates has so far limited our understanding of the potential of Serratia to produce new natural bioactive products and their capacity to be used in sustainable agriculture as biocontrol agents. The ability to isolate Serratia from soils, together with the analytical capabilities 2 afforded by the democratization of genome sequencing methodologies, opens the door to the isolation and characterization of such novel biocontrol agents, hitherto inaccessible. Introduction In 1823, Bartolomeo Bizio, a pharmacist from Padua in Italy, described Serratia marcescens (Bizio 1823) representing the type species of the new genus. A remarkable characteristic of this bacterium was the production of a bright-red pigment called prodigiosin (Williams 1973). A miraculous bloody discolouration in polenta (corn mush) and bread drew the attention of Bizio. He identified a microorganism as the cause of this phenomenon that he named Serratia marcescens: Serratia in honour of an Italian physicist named Serafino Serrati, and marcescens from the Latin word for decaying, because the blood pigment was found to deteriorate quickly. The pigment responsible for the bloody discolouration was later on described and named prodigiosin. Members of the type species S. marcescens are prodigiosin producers and opportunistic nosocomial pathogens, and represent the most important human pathogens within the genus (Eisenstein 1990). Bacteria from
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| Format: | artículo biblioteca |
| Published: |
Kluwer Academic Publishers
2019
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/205550 |
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