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Screening of Microorganisms for New Products - The next step after isolation of microorganisms is their screening. A set of highly selective procedures, which allows the detection and isolation of microorganisms producing the desired metabolite, constitutes primary screening. Ideally, primary screening should be rapid, inexpensive, predictive, specific but effective for a broad range of compounds and applicable on a large scale.

Primary screening is time consuming and labour intensive since a large number of isolates have to be screened to identify a few potential ones. However this is possibly the most critical step since it eliminates the large bulk of unwanted useless isolates, which are either non producers or producers of known compounds.

Computer based databases play an important role by instantaneously providing detailed information about the already known microbial antibiotic compounds.
Rapid and effective screening techniques have been devised for a variety of microbial products, which utilize either a property of the product or that of its biosynthetic pathway for detection of desirable isolates. Some of the screening techniques are relatively simple, e.g., for extracellular enzymes and enzyme inhibitors.

However for most microbial products of high value, the screening is usually complex and tedious, and often may involve two or more steps, e.g., for antimicrobials. In some cases, it may be desirable to concentrate on a group of organisms expected to yield new products.

For example, the search for new antibiotics now focusses on rare Actinomycetes, i.e., Actinomycetes other than those belonging to the genus Streptomyces. Suitably designed specialized screening techniques may be used to detect compounds having various pharmacological activities other than antibiotics.

 
 

 

 
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