Licensed to kill: A new antibiotic, anthracimycin (see scheme), produced by a marine‐derived actinomycete in saline culture, shows significant activity toward Bacillus anthracis, the bacterial pathogen responsible for anthrax infections. Chlorination of anthracimycin gives a dichloro derivative that retains activity against Gram‐positive bacteria, such as anthrax, but also shows activity against selected Gram‐negative bacteria.

Temperate bacterial viruses (phages) may enter a symbiosis with their host cell, forming a unit called a lysogen. Infection and viral replication are disassociated in lysogens until an induction event such as DNA damage occurs, triggering viral-mediated lysis. The lysogen-lytic viral reproduction switch is central to viral ecology, with diverse ecosystem impacts. It has been argued that lysogeny is favoured in phages at low host densities. This paradigm is based on the fraction of chemically inducible cells (FCIC) lysogeny proxy determined using DNA-damaging mitomycin C inductions. Contrary to the established paradigm, a survey of 39 inductions publications found FCIC to be highly variable and pervasively insensitive to bacterial host density at global, within-environment and within-study levels. Attempts to determine the source(s) of variability highlighted the inherent complications in using the FCIC proxy in mixed communities, including dissociation between rates of lysogeny and FCIC values. Ultimately, FCIC studies do not provide robust measures of lysogeny or consistent evidence of either positive or negative host density dependence to the lytic-lysogenic switch. Other metrics are therefore needed to understand the drivers of the lytic-lysogenic decision in viral communities and to test models of the host density-dependent viral lytic-lysogenic switch.

Low-nutrient media and long incubation times facilitated the cultivation of 20 taxonomically diverse Gram-negative marine bacteria within the phyla Bacteroidetes and Proteobacteria. These strains comprise as many as three new families and include members of clades that had only been observed using culture-independent techniques. Chemical studies of the type strains representing two new families within the order Cytophagales led to the isolation of nine new alkaloid secondary metabolites that can be grouped into four distinct structure classes, including azepinones, aziridines, quinolones, and pyrazinones. Several of these compounds possess antibacterial properties and appear, on structural grounds, to be produced by amino acid-based biosynthetic pathways. Our results demonstrate that relatively simple cultivation techniques can lead to the isolation of new bacterial taxa that are capable of the production of alkaloid secondary metabolites with antibacterial activities. These findings support continued investment in cultivation techniques as a method for natural product discovery.

The isolation and structure elucidation of a new meroterpenoid, actinoranone (1), produced by a marine bacterium closely related to the genus Streptomyces is reported. Actinoranone is composed of an unprecedented dihydronaphthalenone polyketide linked to a bicyclic diterpenoid. The stereochemistry of 1 was defined by application of the advanced Mosher's method and by interpretation of spectroscopic data. Actinoranone (1) is significantly cytotoxic to HCT-116 human colon cancer cells with an LD50 = 2.0 μg/mL.