Biosynthetic novelty index reveals the metabolic potential of rare actinobacteria isolated from highly oligotrophic sediments.

ABSTRACT: Calculations predict that testing of 5 000-10 000 molecules and >1 billion US dollars (£0.8 billion, £1=$1.2) are required for one single drug to come to the market. A solution to this problem is to establish more efficient protocols that reduce the high rate of re-isolation and continuous rediscovery of natural products during early stages of the drug development process. The study of 'rare actinobacteria' has emerged as a possible approach for increasing the discovery rate of drug leads from natural sources. Here, we define a simple genomic metric, defined as biosynthetic novelty index (BiNI), that can be used to rapidly rank strains according to the novelty of the subset of encoding biosynthetic clusters. By comparing a subset of high-quality genomes from strains of different taxonomic

SUBMITTER: Gonzalez-Salazar LA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9973853 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature