Sweet home actinomycetes: The 1999 MDS Panlabs Lecture

For the past 25 years, I have devoted most of my research efforts to the ap plication of molecular genetics to yield improvement and production of nove l secondary metabolites in actinomycetes. My group at Lilly Research Labora tories worked with a variety of Streptomyces species and with strains of Am ycolatopsis and Saccharopolyspora. We developed molecular genetic tools to manipulate actinomycete genes, and applied them to important secondary meta bolites, including tylosin, daptomycin, vancomycin, chloroeremomycin, and s pinosyns. In the early years, I helped establish recombinant DNA technology to manufacture mammalian proteins, and more recently, helped implement mic robial genomics as a research tool for antibiotic discovery. In this paper, I review some highlights, primarily from the actinomycete work.