Comparative transcriptomics as a guide to natural product discovery and biosynthetic gene cluster functionality.

ABSTRACT: Bacterial natural products remain an important source of new medicines. DNA sequencing has revealed that a majority of natural product biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) maintained in bacterial genomes have yet to be linked to the small molecules whose biosynthesis they encode. Efforts to discover the products of these orphan BGCs are driving the development of genome mining techniques based on the premise that many are transcriptionally silent during normal laboratory cultivation. Here, we employ comparative transcriptomics to assess BGC expression among four closely related strains of marine bacteria belonging to the genus Salinispora The results reveal that slightly more than half of the BGCs are expressed at levels that should facilitate product detection. By comparing the expres

SUBMITTER: Amos GCA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5748202 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature