In a close collaboration, researchers from the Leibniz Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures and from the department “Microbial Drugs” at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) have discovered two previously unknown natural products. Lavasamycin A and B are produced by the bacterium Streptomyces barkulensis subsp. lavasanensis, which was isolated from a soil sample collected in Lavasan, Iran, and characterized as a new subspecies at the DSMZ. The findings have been published in the renowned journal Journal of Natural Products.

The Braunschweig Centre for Systems Biology (BRICS) is celebrating its tenth anniversary. Since its foundation, this interdisciplinary and internationally oriented research center has been bringing together researchers from the Life Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering. Together, they are working to gain a better understanding of complex biological processes. In doing so, BRICS brings together the scientific expertise of four partner institutions: Technische Universität Braunschweig, the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), the German National Metrology Institute (PTB), and the Leibniz Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH (DSMZ).

Natural products produced by microorganisms are a promising source of new drugs. Researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and its Saarbrücken-based site, the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), have now discovered a new family of such compounds, elucidated their unusual biosynthesis, and developed a way to produce them synthetically. They also found that this class of compounds binds specifically to a human protein involved in the development of cancer. The findings were published in two thematically linked studies in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.