From Actinomycin onwards: Actinomycete success stories

Abstract

The discovery, development and exploitation of antibiotics was one of the most significant advances in medicine in the 20th century. In a golden era lasting from the 1940s to the late 1960s, antibiotic research provided mankind with a wide range of structurally diverse and effective agents for the treatment of microbial infections. Since then, the members of the order Actinomycetales, most notably the genus Streptomyces have proved to be a particularly rich source of antibiotics (Table 1) with extensive therapeutic applications, possibly because of the extra-large DNA complement of these bacteria.