Nigel J. Mouncey, J. Dinglasan, D. Doering, K. Kukil, H. Otani, D. Udwary

U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA nmouncey@lbl.gov

The galaxy of natural products comprises a large family of diverse and complex chemical entities that have roles in both primary and secondary metabolism, and today >36,000 natural products have been characterized. We are seeing a resurgence of activity in exploring secondary metabolites for a wide range of applications, due to not only increasing antibiotic and pesticide resistance, but the advent of next-generation genome sequencing and new technologies to investigate natural product biosynthesis. There remains a treasure trove of natural products that remains to be unlocked. At the JGI, we have developed new tools and processes for identification of novel biosynthetic gene clusters from isolate genomes and metagenomes and complementing these with a suite of new experimental platforms to access the products of these clusters. We have built a new secondary metabolite biosynthetic cluster prediction pipeline and a data portal, the Secondary Metabolism Collaboratory, as a new community-centric resource. Furthermore, we have developed capabilities to understand how secondary metabolite biosynthesis is regulated, expression systems in native and heterologous hosts and with cell-free technology to access unexplored chemistry and used these to explore secondary metabolites from a range of organisms. I will share our recent developments in unlocking the Earth’s Secondary Metabolome.