Detecting Biosynthetic Gene Clusters

The screening of bioactive secondary metabolites has long been a large contributor to the development of useful industrial compounds, including important medical compounds such as antibiotics. Bioactive secondary metabolites are encoded by a range of biosynthetic gene clusters. However, traditional techniques for the detection of biosynthetic gene clusters have largely relied on cultivation dependent methods, unhelpful if trying to detect novel pathways in the ginormous abundance of uncultivated organisms.

Our honours student, Ray Chen, recently published a review article highlighting the advances of modern genomic and bioinformatic techniques over traditional cultivation dependent screening techniques in the detection of biosynthetic gene clusters. The article, published in the journal Medicines, discusses how the use of bioinformatic tools has allowed us to tap into the huge development potential of microbial dark matter.