Chemical screening: a simple approach to visualizing Streptomyces diversity for drug discovery and further research

The morphological and biochemical characteristics of Streptomyces species tend to be very similar, and thus the elucidation of their diversity is both time- and money-consuming. Here we evaluated various streptomycetes isolates using a chemical screening approach in order to establish their secondary metabolite patterns, thereby avoiding the possible discounting of morphologically similar strains. Results demonstrated that each isolate presented a unique pattern of secondary metabolites independently of their morphological and biochemical characteristics. We also established the enormous diversity in metabolic products among our isolates, and thus many potentially new metabolites may be studied in further research. Our results indicate that chemical screening is a simple selection method for recognizing the specific fingerprint of each isolate, highlighting the particular metabolic characteristics of each with respect to the other studied strains.