Mining microbial genomes for interesting metabolites

Description

Secondary metabolites produced by microorganisms are the main source of bioactive compounds thatare in use as antimicrobial and anticancer drugs, fungicides, herbicides and pesticides. As anincreasing number of microorganisms is becoming resistant against the antimicrobial compoundscurrently in use, there is a dire need for new compounds and compound classes that show newmodes of action to avoid the current resistance mechanisms. In the last decade, the increasingavailability of microbial genomes has established genome mining as a very important method for theidentification of biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) responsible for producing such novel compounds.This talk will present antiSMASH, a Python-based tool to mine microbial genomes for interestingBGCs in order to find new bioactive lead compounds. I will show how Python helped antiSMASH tobecome the most widely used tool in the field, with over half a million of processed jobs and over 2000weekly users on the public web service alone. I will also present the up- and downsides of running acomplex analysis pipeline as a web service in Python.

Period	22 Nov 2019
Event title	PyPharma
Event type	Conference
Conference number	1
Location	Basel, Switzerland
Degree of Recognition	International