Isolation and phylogenetic characterisation of an antimicrobially active bacterial strain from the Telescopium telescopium

Antimicrobial resistance is a global concern that diminishes the options for treating diseases caused by microbes. The WHO global report indicates a rise in mortality from infectious diseases attributable to antimicrobial resistance, leading to a global economic loss of up to 100 trillion USD by 2050. Consequently, the identification of novel antibacterial agents having clinical relevance is imperative. The diversity of marine ecosystems has led to the discovery of a wide range of metabolites with bioactive qualities. Conversely, numerous bioactive compounds linked to marine invertebrates are synthesised by their symbiotic microbes. Thus, the current work focused on the identification of bacterial strains from Telescopium telescopium exhibiting antimicrobial potential. This investigation isolated 10 distinct bacterial colonies, designated as ZTS-01 to ZTS-10. Among the 10 isolates, ZTS-08 showed superior antimicrobial activity against the examined bacterial and fungus species except C. albicans. The PCR-amplified 16s rRNA gene of ZTS-08 comprises of 1500 bp in length and its G+C proportion is 58.46%. The multiple sequence alignments reveal variance, conserved sites and parsimony sites of 0.88, 0.06 and 0.021 respectively, with an overall mean distance of 0.01. According to molecular phylogenetics and morphological analyses, the bacterial isolate ZTS-08 is a member of the N. dassonvillei species.