Type: Article

Phylogenomic analysis of natural products biosynthetic gene clusters allows discovery of arseno-organic metabolites in model streptomycetes

Pablo Cruz-Morales, Johannes Florian Kopp, Christian Martínez-Guerrero, Luis Alfonso Yáñez-Guerra, Nelly Selem-Mojica, Hilda Ramos-Aboites, Jörg Feldmann, Francisco Barona-Gomez;

Abstract:

Natural products from microbes have provided humans with beneficial antibiotics for millennia. However, a decline in the pace of antibiotic discovery exerts pressure on human health as antibiotic resistance spreads, a challenge that may better faced by unveiling chemical diversity produced by microbes. Current microbial genome mining approaches have revitalized research into antibiotics, but the empirical nature of these methods limits the chemical space that is explored. Here, we address the problem of finding novel pathways by incorporating evolutionary principles into genome mining. We recapitulated the evolutionary history of twenty-three enzyme families previously uninvestigated in the context of natural product biosynthesis in Actinobacteria , the most proficient producers of natural products. Our genome evolutionary analyses where based on the assumption that expanded …