Bacteria Isolated from Canada’s White Rabbit Cave Revealed Antimicrobial Activities

Caves offer a unique habitat for microorganisms, which allow the adaptation of exclusive metabolic pathways to the resources available. This environment could enable the production of primary and secondary metabolites with unique antimicrobial or enzymatic properties. White Rabbit Cave is located in the Monashee Mountain range in south-central British Columbia, a metamorphic range not known for cave and karst development. The present study has recovered bacterial isolates from the White Rabbit Cave and assessed them for their antimicrobial properties by employing the agar plug assay. One hundred and six bacterial isolates were cultivated from the collected samples, among which, five bacterial isolates displayed antimicrobial properties against a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strain. Furthermore, these five isolates were identified with 16S rRNA gene sequencing and through phylogenetic analysis. It has been observed that three of them (B076, B053, and B079) were identified as Streptomyces spp. (Phylum Actinobacteria) while the other two were recognized as Paenibacillus spp. (B039) and Paenibacillus terrae (B016) (Phylum Firmicutes). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that identifies bacterial species with antimicrobial properties from White Rabbit Cave in the Monashee Mountain range in British Columbia, Canada.