A Bioinformatics Workflow for Investigating Fungal Biosynthetic Gene Clusters

Methods Mol Biol. 2022:2489:1-21. doi: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2273-5_1.

Abstract

Predicting secondary metabolite biosynthetic gene clusters is a routine analysis performed for each newly sequenced fungal genome. Yet, the usefulness of such predictions remains restricted as they provide total numbers of biosynthetic pathways with only very limited biological significance. In this chapter, we describe a workflow to predict and analyze biosynthetic gene clusters in fungal genomes. It relies on similarity networking and phylogeny to perform genetic dereplication and to prioritize candidate gene clusters that potentially produce new compounds. This basic workflow includes the generation of high-quality figures for publication.

Keywords: Comparative genomics; Genome mining; Natural products; Phylogeny; Secondary metabolites; Similarity networks.

MeSH terms

  • Biosynthetic Pathways / genetics
  • Computational Biology*
  • Genome, Fungal
  • Multigene Family*
  • Workflow