Inna Volynkina, Dmitrii Lukianov, Petr Sergiev, Olga Dontsova and Ilya Osterman have co-authored a recent preprint “Mechanism-based Approach to New Antibiotic Producers Screening among Actinomycetes in the Course of Civil Science”. Fungi belonging to the actinomycetes remain a very promising reservoir for searching for new active molecules that may have antibacterial activity. The researchers present several reporters containing eye-visible fluorescent protein genes, which can be used to increase the efficiency of determining the mechanism of antibiotics at the very initial stage of screening. Presented reporters and the following pipeline were optimized given the involvement of citizen scientists without specialized skills and equipment in order to utilize the reservoir of soil bacteria in the search for new antibiotic producers. Two new strains Streptomyces sp. KB-1 and BV113 were found to produce antibiotics pikromycin and chartreusin, respectively, demonstrating the efficiency of the pipeline. Full text of the preprint is available here.