Characterization of Natural Therapeutic Compounds Producing Novel Bacterial Strains isolated from Hyderabad, India

Natural products (NPs), also known as secondary metabolites, have biological effects on organisms and other organisms. Among the microbial consortia, bacteria have been demonstrated to be potent microbial producers of bioactive natural therapeutic products due to their versatile biocatalytic activity. The present study encompasses the isolation, identification, and analysis of four novel bacterial strains that exhibited the potential to produce natural therapeutic products. The novel cadre of the isolates was determined via taxonomical assessment, employment of myriad biochemical, antagonistic screening tests, followed by 16S rRNA molecular characterization and bioinformatics analysis, which allowed the naming of the subsequent isolates as, Klebsiella pneumoniae strain ABSKALAB01, Klebsiella quasipneumonia strain ABSKSLAB02, Streptomyces minutiscleroticus strain ABSKSLAB03 and Streptomyces peucetius strain ABSKSLAB04 and sequences were deposited in NCBI- GenBank database with accession numbers ‘OP597532’, ‘OP597545’, ‘OQ061473’ and ‘PP086938’, respectively. Amongst all the bacterial strains, Streptomyces peucetius strain ABSKSLAB04 demonstrated the highest potential to exhibit antagonistic activity and produce natural therapeutic products. Further studies include optimization using the OVAT approach and statistical optimization by Plackett–Burman, RSM - Box–Behnken design, and Artificial Neural Networks. These techniques were conducted to assess the antagonistic and NP-producing potential of the bacterial strains This resulted in the ANN model being superior to the RSM model with augmented statistical metrics; R ² – 92.23%, MSE – 0.0277 and RMSE – 0.1477, proving its high predicting and generalization ability. Furthermore, it was followed by constructing the secondary structure of 16S rRNA. Hence, the results conclude the augmented potential of subsequent bacterial strains, especially Streptomyces peucetius in the biotechnological paradigms, with high scalability in the pharmaceutical and industrial sectors.