Congratulations Mario Sandoval

Mario Sandoval - Azul

“Azul” by Mario Sandoval, 2012.

The image is a photograph of a colony set of Steptomyces coelicolor, an amazing bacterium for its multilevel complexity. Daily soil inhabitant, producer of the volatile molecule that gives its characteristic smell to wet earth, with a life cycle that more closely resembles that of a fungus to a textbook bacteria, also has a wonderful metabolism allowing it to produce multiple antibiotics and pigments - like the ones that give the dark color to the culture medium seen in the picture and make up droplets of bacterial colonies. Bacteria of the genus to which this species belongs, are the source of more than a third of the natural antibiotics. Several of these antibiotics are produced by modular molecular machines which resemble assembly industrial tapes called "non-ribosomal peptide synthetases." All these features make me think that sooner or later synthetic biology will start to get away from the traditional models of genetic manipulation to dabble in the delights of perhaps the less studied organisms, but certainly much more interesting for all the biochemical and molecular arsenal that many of them already have.