Biosynthetic gene clusters and natural product discovery

Microorganisms in the environment can produce a diverse range of natural products also known as secondary metabolites. Bioactive secondary metabolites have been crucial in the development of antibiotics and as useful compounds in the biotechnology industry. These secondary metabolites are encoded by an extensive range of biosynthetic gene clusters. Developments in omics technologies and bioinformatic tools are contributing to a paradigm shift from traditional culturing and screening methods to bioinformatic tools and genomics to uncover biosynthetic gene clusters previously unknown or transcriptionally silent. Using bioinformatic pipelines such as antiSMASH this project, lead by honours student Ray Chen, aims to identify and characterise biosynthetic gene clusters in modern microbial mats.