From Soil to Solutions: Luca Salvi on Discovering Antibiotics from Underexplored Microbes

Antibiotic resistance is rising, and Luca Salvi is digging deep for answers. As part of the MAGic-MOLFUN doctoral network, Luca is exploring the biosynthetic secrets of rare soil bacteria. In this interview, he talks about what makes microbes so fascinating, the joys (and quirks) of growing new strains, and why a well-organized PhD start makes all the difference.

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Luca’s project, titled “Identification of novel secondary metabolites from rare actinomycetes”, focuses on isolating and characterizing new bioactive compounds from underexplored bacterial strains. His approach combines several cutting-edge techniques expressing biosynthetic gene clusters in more lab-friendly hosts, modifying regulatory genes to activate silent pathways, engineering metabolic environments to enhance compound production, and using chromatography and structural tools to identify and analyze the molecules. The ultimate goal? To discover novel antibiotics that could help in the global fight against resistant infections