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As bacterial natural products have been proved to be the most important source of many therapeutic medicines, the need to discover novel natural products becomes extremely urgent. Despite the fact that the majority of bacterial species are yet to be cultured in a laboratory setting, and that most of the bacterial natural product biosynthetic genes are silent, "metagenomics technology" offers a solution to help clone natural product biosynthetic genes from environmental samples, and genetic engineering enables the silent biosynthetic genes to be activated. In this work, a type II polyketide biosynthetic gene cluster was identified from a soil metagenomic library and was activated by over-expression of a SARP regulator gene in the gene cluster in Streptomyces hosts. A new tetracenomycin type compound tetracenomycin Y was identified from the fermentation broth. This study shows that metagenomics and genetic engineering could be combined to provide access to new natural metabolites.

Soil microbiota represents one of the ancient evolutionary origins of antibiotic resistance and has been increasingly recognized as a potentially vast unstudied reservoir of resistance genes with possibilities to exchange with pathogens. Tetracycline resistance is one of the most abundant antibiotic resistances that may transfer among clinical and commensal microorganisms. To investigate tetracycline resistance genes from soil bacteria in different habitats, we performed functional analysis of three metagenomic libraries derived from soil samples collected from Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tibet, respectively, in China. We found efflux transporter genes form all the libraries, including 21 major facilitator superfamily efflux pump genes and one multidrug and toxic compound extrusion (MATE) transporter gene. Interestingly, we also identified two tetracycline destructase genes, belonging to a newly described family of tetracycline-inactivating enzymes that scarcely observed in clinical pathogens, from the Tibet library. The inactivation activity of the putative enzyme was confirmed in vitro by biochemical analysis. Our results indicated that efflux pumps distributed predominantly across habitats. Meanwhile, the mechanism of enzymatic inactivation for tetracycline resistance should not be neglected and merits further investigation.