Harnessing the microbial interactions from Apocynum venetum phyllosphere for natural product discovery

Natural products (NPs) afforded by living-beings, especially by microscopic species, represent invaluable and indispensable reservoirs for drug leads in clinical practice. With the rapid advancement in sequencing technology and bioinformatics, the ever-increasing number of microbial biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) were decrypted, while a great deal of BGCs remain cryptic or inactive under standard laboratory culture conditions. Addressing this dilemma requires innovative tactics to awaken quiescence of BGCs by releasing the potential of microbial secondary metabolism for mining novel NPs. In this study, a universal strategy was proposed to induce the expression of silent BGCs by leveraging the dynamic interactions among coexisting microbial neighbors within a microbiota. This approach involves the deconstruction/reconstruction of binary interactions among the coexisting neighbors to create a pipeline for BGCs arousing. Coupled with the acquisition of 2760 microbial individuals from the <i>Apocynum venetum</i> (Luobuma, LBM) phyllosphere in a successive dilution procedure, 44 culturable isolates were screened using binary interaction, in which 12.6 % pairs demonstrated potent mutual interacting effects. Furthermore, after selecting the four most promising isolates, a full-scale metabolic inspection was conducted, in which 25.3 % of the interacting pairs showcased significant metabolomic variations with de-cryptic activities. Notably, with the aid of visualization of IMS technology, one of the physiologically functional entities, the bactericidal agent resistomycin, was elucidated from the core interacting pair between the co-culture of the <i>Streptomyces</i> sp. LBM_605 and the <i>Rhodococcus</i> sp. LBM_791. This study highlights the intrinsic interactions among coexisting microorganisms within a phyllosphere microbiota as novel avenues for exploring and harnessing NPs.