DOI

  • Tiago Leão
  • Mingxun Wang
  • Nathan Moss
  • Ricardo da Silva
  • Jon Sanders
  • Sergey Nurk
  • Gregory Humphrey
  • Raphael Reher
  • Qiyun Zhu
  • Pedro Belda-Ferre
  • Evgenia Glukhov
  • Syrena Whitner
  • Kelsey L. Alexander
  • Robert Rex
  • Pavel Pevzner
  • Pieter C. Dorrestein
  • Rob Knight
  • Nuno Bandeira
  • William H. Gerwick
  • Lena Gerwick

Microbial natural products are important for the understanding of microbial interactions, chemical defense and communication, and have also served as an inspirational source for numerous pharmaceutical drugs. Tropical marine cyanobacteria have been highlighted as a great source of new natural products, however, few reports have appeared wherein a multi-omics approach has been used to study their natural products potential (i.e., reports are often focused on an individual natural product and its biosynthesis). This study focuses on describing the natural product genetic potential as well as the expressed natural product molecules in benthic tropical cyanobacteria. We collected from several sites around the world and sequenced the genomes of 24 tropical filamentous marine cyanobacteria. The informatics program antiSMASH was used to annotate the major classes of gene clusters. BiG-SCAPE phylum-wide analysis revealed the most promising strains for natural product discovery among these cyanobacteria. LCMS/MS-based metabolomics highlighted the most abundant molecules and molecular classes among 10 of these marine cyanobacterial samples. We observed that despite many genes encoding for peptidic natural products, peptides were not as abundant as lipids and lipopeptides in the chemical extracts. Our results highlight a number of highly interesting biosynthetic gene clusters for genome mining among these cyanobacterial samples.

Original languageEnglish
Article number20
Number of pages16
JournalMarine Drugs
Volume19
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 6 Jan 2021

    Scopus subject areas

  • Drug Discovery

    Research areas

  • biosynthetic potential, genomics, marine cyanobacteria, metabolomics, natural products, COLLECTION, QUALITY, LIPOPEPTIDES, DEPSIPEPTIDES, DISCOVERY, SOFTWARE, ALIGNMENT, COMPARATIVE GENOMICS, METABOLITE, TOOL

ID: 74445056