Natural products from environmental DNA hosted in Ralstonia metallidurans

Metagenomic studies designed to access new small molecules from the heterologous expression of environmental DNA have focused on the use of two model systems, Escherichia coli and Streptomyces spp., as heterologous hosts. Accessing the biosynthetic potential of DNA extracted from the bacteria present in environmental samples will require the development of a more diverse collection of model bacterial hosts that can be used for screening environmental DNA libraries. In this study the bacterium Ralstonia metallidurans was explored as a heterologous host. Here we report the isolation and characterization of both novel and known metabolites from pigmented and antibacterially active clones found in R. metallidurans based environmental DNA libraries. The clones found in this study do not confer the production of clone-specific metabolites to E. coli, validating R. metallidurans as an orthogonal expression host that can be used to expand the number of metabolites found in future metagenomic discovery efforts.