Heterogeneity in the secondary metabolism of Photorhabdus and Xenorhabdus

Although natural products (NP) like antibiotics play an important role in our daily life we hardly know anything about the regulation of their production. Bacterial NP producers usually have the capacity to produce several different NP and often can produce even several different derivatives thereof at a given time. As this requires a large proportion of the cells energy and resources due to the often huge enzymatic complexes involved, a system in which a small fraction of cells produce only a fraction of compounds (division of labor) might be advantageous for the bacterial colony as by that all cells can make and use all compounds made by the community. We use entomopathogenic bacteria of the genera Photorhabdus and Xenorhabdus bacteria that are known producers of several bioactive natural products as models to study the heterogeneity in natural product production using especially non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS) and type II polyketide synthases (PKS) as model NPs.