Biodiscovery and bioindustry

This issue of Microbiology Australia has the broad theme, biodiscovery and bioindustry. Many of the invited articles have been contributed by The ASM’s early and mid-career researchers following presentations at the 2024 ASM conference in Brisbane.

Australian discoveries in microbiology are diverse and we have tried to provide a broad selection of these discoveries. In other examples, works have progressed to a delivery stage, where after years of painstaking research and innovation, a mature technological advance is set to take place that could transform a situation.

Health research involves many of our ASM members and several articles address health issues. One of the world’s biggest diseases, tuberculosis (TB), has still not been conquered, but new work by Hannah Lukeman, Elizabeth Chan and Jamie Triccas targets TB with lipid nanoparticles carrying mRNA. This represents are new advance in TB research and their work is receiving international attention.

Respiratory infections in children are always of great concern. Tamlyn Fairall, Yi Bin Koh, Mark Nicol and Ritika Kar Bahal discuss their work on live biotherapies that can potentially be useful in the treatment of respiratory infections including pneumonia.

In the area of chronic wound healing, host–pathogen relationships are an important consideration. Work by Michelle Chamoun and Gabriela Gonzalez Matheus examines the role of complement in the healing and infection control.

Surfaces are a major source of bacterial infections and Denver Linklater and Elena Ivanova have examined how some natural surfaces including plant and insect wing surfaces evade bacterial attack. They have used the latest printing technologies to further define optimal surfaces. This work is also coming close to being a game changer for infection control.

Bacteriophages have for a long time shown good outcomes in human infections. In the marine world, infections of bivalves have been shown by Tuan Son Le and İpek Kurtböke to be reduced by bacteriophages. This could offer further advances in international food security.

Antibiotics have been a mainstay in our fight against pathogenic microbes for many years; however, the development of new antibiotics has been slowed greatly in recent years and our arsenal is severely lacking due to the rapid development of antibiotic resistance among harmful microorganisms. The actinomycetes are by far the greatest source of our antibiotics but new approaches are now required to further access their powers. İpek Kurtböke discusses the use of metabolic engineering and artificial intellegence (AI) to extract more from this important group of bacteria.

Australia’s Synchrotron also offers opportunities for novel drug discovery by looking at drug targets and their interactions at the molecular levels. Ashish Sethi, Rachel Williamson, Emily Finch, Daniel Häusermann, Helen Brand and Danielle Martin discuss how this impressive facility is used and how it aids drug discovery.

The production of drugs sometimes involves chemistry but often more complex drugs like antibodies and other biomolecules require biological production in fermenters. Making this process efficient requires precision fermentation, which Samantha Sawyer and Tom Ross discuss in their contribution.

A food producer, in more ways than one, the honeybee, is also important for pollination of our crops and other food production. However, they are under threat to disease in their hives. The article by Kenya Fernandes identifies threats and opportunities for sustaining the viability of bees into the future.

Cattle are also an important source of food but are criticised for their methane contributions to greenhouse gases. Work by Ibrahim Ahmad, Richard Rawnsley, John Bowman and Apeh Omede studies the rumen microbes involved in methane production and considers how levels of methane production can be reduced.

Another article focused on environmental issues is by Arturo Aburto Medina, Soulayma Hassan, Chaitali Dekiwadia, Chengrong Chen and Andrew Ball. It offers a solution to the some of the plastic pollution problem with the production of bio-based plastics. These of course would be biodegradable, something that most current plastics are highly resistant too.

İpek Kurtböke, Ian Macreadie and Tom Ross