Combing databases reveals potential antibiotic producers.

The large-scale, persistent use of antibiotics has provoked microbes to evolve mechanisms to evade them. Pharmaceutical companies have found this to be counterproductive to their business economics. To maintain company interest to invest in this sector, innovative alternatives are needed. The availability of metabolic and genomic databases has opened up an avenue for such discoveries. Using these databases, potential producers of penicillin and cephalosporin have been traced. In addition, organisms that can be transformed from their present 'non'-producer status to antibacterial producers by supplementing their missing gene(s) by recombinant DNA technology have been revealed.