Technology
eMetagen accesses uncultured microorganisms to discover new, active natural products made by them. Since traditional drug hunters can grow only a tiny fraction of the naturally-occurring microbes from any environment, their efforts miss >99% of nature’s microbial diversity. With advanced molecular biology techniques, eMetagen bypasses the cultivation step in producing microbial natural products. DNA is cloned directly from microbial populations and their biochemical pathways for making natural products are expressed directly in easy-to-grow host organisms. In this way, eMetagen gains accesses to a huge, unexploited resource missed by older drug discovery approaches.
The key technology that differentiates eMetagen from other molecular bioprospecting companies is a suite of methods for cloning very large pieces of DNA from soil microorganisms. Pathways for production of microbial natural products are encoded in long stretches of adjacent genes, each of which encodes an enzyme responsible for a step in natural product biosynthesis. eMetagen Gene and Pathway Banks™ contain clones large enough to encompass entire natural product pathways. eMetagen’s large-insert clone banks promise high discovery rates for new pharmaceutical compounds with new mechanisms of action.