Encouraged by its success in the mega project on prospecting of drugs from microbe, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) has embarked upon a public-private partnership programme on opportunities to explore microbial diversity for industrial important microbial products.

Senior officials in the DBT said that this new programme, for which the DBT has invited letters of intent, will be another opportunity for entrepreneurs, industry and academia to put up collaborative efforts to explore this microbial biodiversity for identifying novel bio-molecules.

Officials said that in a programme, recently carried out under the aegis of DBT nearly 245,000 bacteria have been collected from diverse ecological niches from regions located all over India by a team of scientists from reputed national R&D institutes and universities. These include bacteria from extreme environments such as marine sediments, mangrove rich area, hot springs, effluent treatment plants, river sediments, wet land ecosystem, insect guts, north east and western ghats.

These bacterial isolates representing the diversity of ecological niches of the country have been preserved as per internationally accepted protocols in a recently created national facility (IDA approved) at National Centre for Cell Science, Pune. This culture collection has been evaluated for its novelties and capacities, through an industrial (R&D) house, for bioactive molecules relevant for anti-diabetes, anti-inflammation, anti-cancer and anti-infectivity.

The DBT has invited letters of intent from R&D centres (national laboratories, public institutes, universities etc.) preferably with industrial partners who are interested in prospecting microbial resources for developing biotechnological product(s) of industrial importance. It is proposed to focus a major national mission to screen these microbes for activities other than the four listed above.

Some of the illustrative example of industrial products include: Extracellular Low molecular wt. molecules secreted by the microbes (< 1000 Daltons), e.g. carboxylic acids, amino acids, secondary metabolites e.g. antibiotics, vitamins, metabolites, enzyme inhibitors, Microbial Toxins and Quorum sensing inhibitors; Extracellular Peptides (these can be anti-hypertensive agents, food preservative agents, anti-microbial peptides, immuno-modulators); Extracellular Proteins (enzymes, therapeutic proteins) and Intracellular products (therapeutic molecules, proteins carbohydrates); Whole cell use of the microbes (probiotics, metabolic pathway engineering), Cell wall/cell membranes (vaccines, receptors); Specialized proteases: Substrate specific enzymes such as Aminopeptidases and carboxy peptidases; Enzymes relevant in biofuel technology: cellulase and hemicellulase, thermostable and acidic amylopullulanase as well as esterases and lipases; Organisms capable of utilizing C5 sugars such as arabinose or xylose for value addition through fermentation; and Bioactive molecules such as enzyme inhibitors of important metabolic pathways i.e. targets like methionine aminopeptidases or peptide defromylase of pathogens like mycobaterium or malarial parasites. Betalactam along with betalactamase inhibitors.