The first antibiotic, salvarsan, was deployed in 1910. In just over 100 years antibiotics have
drastically changed modern medicine and extended the average human lifespan by 23 years…

Streptomyces bacteria are ubiquitous in soil, conferring the characteristic earthy smell, and
they have an important ecological role in the turnover of organic material. More recently, a …

The bacterial cell envelope is the first and major line of defence against threats from the
environment. It is an essential and yet vulnerable structure that gives the cell its shape and …

Actinomycetes are a diverse family of filamentous bacteria that produce a plethora of natural
products relevant for agriculture, biotechnology and medicine, including the majority of the …

… light microscopy, Colin Kay and Lionel Hill for their assistance with LC-MS/MS, Govind
Chandra for his advice on sequence analysis, Neil Gow for Candida strains and the Hutchings …

Gram-positive bacterial lipoproteins are a functionally diverse and important class of peripheral
membrane proteins. Recent advances in molecular biology and the availability of whole …

Attine ants are dependent on a cultivated fungus for food and use antibiotics produced by
symbiotic Actinobacteria as weedkillers in their fungus gardens. Actinobacterial species …

The non-pathogenic, non-glycopeptide-producing actinomycete Streptomyces coelicolor
carries a cluster of seven genes (vanSRJKHAX) that confers inducible, high level resistance to …

We report a new Streptomyces species named S. formicae that was isolated from the African
fungus-growing plant-ant Tetraponera penzigi and show that it produces novel pentacyclic …

… (MI Hutchings & MJ Buttner, unpublished). Interestingly, of the four transcripts encoding
these van genes, all but the vanJ transcript are leaderless (Hong et al., 2004), a situation that …