Genome Mining Revealed a High Biosynthetic Potential for Antifungal Sp. S-2 Isolated from Black Soot

The increasing resistance of fungal pathogens has heightened the necessity of searching for new organisms and compounds to combat their spread. are bacteria that are well-known for the production of many antibiotics. To find novel antibiotic agents, researchers have turned to previously neglected and extreme environments. Here, we isolated a new strain, sp. S-2, for the first time, from black soot after hard coal combustion (collected from an in-use household chimney). We examined its antifungal properties against plant pathogens and against fungi that potentially pose threat to human health (, and the environmental isolates citrinoviridae Cin-9, sp. roseF7, and sp. junF9). Furthermore, we obtained the genome sequence of S-2 and examined its potential for secondary metabolites production using anti-SMASH software. The S-2 strain shows activity against all of the tested fungi. Genome mining elucidated a vast number of biosynthetic gene clusters (55), which distinguish this strain from closely related strains. The majority of the predicted clusters were assigned to non-ribosomal peptide synthetases or type 1 polyketide synthetases, groups known to produce compounds with antimicrobial activity. A high number of the gene clusters showed no, or low similarity to those in the database, raising the possibility that S-2 could be a producer of novel antibiotics. Future studies on sp. S-2 will elucidate its full biotechnological potential.