Type: Article

EvoMining reveals the origin and fate of natural product biosynthetic enzymes

Nelly Sélem-Mojica, César Aguilar, Karina Gutiérrez-García, Christian E Martínez-Guerrero, Fancisco Barona-Gómez;

Abstract:

Natural products (NPs), or specialized metabolites, are important for medicine and agriculture alike, and for the fitness of the organisms that produce them. NP genome-mining aims at extracting biosynthetic information from the genomes of microbes presumed to produce these compounds. Typically, canonical enzyme sequences from known biosynthetic systems are identified after sequence similarity searches. Despite this being an efficient process, the likelihood of identifying truly novel systems by this approach is low. To overcome this limitation, we previously introduced EvoMining, a genome-mining approach that incorporates evolutionary principles. Here, we release and use our latest EvoMining version, which includes novel visualization features and customizable databases, to analyse 42 central metabolic enzyme families (EFs) conserved throughout Actinobacteria , Cyanobacteria , Pseudomonas and …