Testing elicitors of homologous JadR2 proteins to regulate natural product production

Authors

• Carzon J. Williams, Metro Nashville Public SchoolsFollow
• Emilee A. Patterson, Vanderbilt UniversityFollow
• Allison S. Walker, Vanderbilt UniversityFollow

Streaming Media

Publication Date

Summer 7-14-2026

Presentation Length

Poster/Gallery presentation

College

College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences

Department

Biology, Department of

Student Level

Undergraduate

Faculty Mentor

Emilee Patterson

Presentation Type

Poster

Summary

The growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has and will contribute to global economic and public health concerns in the foreseeable future leading into 2050. As mortality rates derived from AMR are projected to reach 10 million if no viable solution is found to combat it through hastened drug discovery. The use of natural products to mitigate AMRs effects is viable as more than 50% of FDA approved drugs are natural products. These natural products are synthesized by biosynthetic gene clusters (BGC), found in bacteria with a regulatory protein not allowing transcription until unbound . Current methods of eliciting the unbinding of this protein such as co-culturing involve replicating exact conditions for the BGC to produce a specific natural product in response. This method is expensive, not targeted, and has high throughput . New methods, such as the use of  common elicitors predicted by a machine learning Sequence similarity network (SSN)  can be used to bind to the elicitor binding domain of the repressive protein, releasing it once done. We used data from GFP expressions of multiple double transformations to test the JADR2 regulatory protein found in Streptomyces venezuele (SV), heterologously in BL21 E.coli. Chloramphenicol was used to test elicitation when induced in four other homologous proteins as well, testing their elicitation due to their homologous DNA sequences. After GFP plate readouts we infer that, one protein, the Streptomyces globospourous JADR2 protein, seemed to have a significant increase in GFP expressions 490, showing a strong elicitation for this ~60% homologous protein. In future studies, there is an interest in testing species that have a JadR2 homolog (SE, SG, SBi).

Recommended Citation

Williams, Carzon J.; Patterson, Emilee A.; and Walker, Allison S., "Testing elicitors of homologous JadR2 proteins to regulate natural product production" (2026). SPARK Symposium Presentations. 698.
https://repository.belmont.edu/spark_presentations/698