Mining of microbial genomes has revealed that actinomycetes harbor far more biosynthetic potential for bioactive natural products than anticipated. Activation of (cryptic) biosynthetic gene clusters and identification of the corresponding metabolites has become a focal point for drug discovery. Here, we applied NMR-based metabolomics combined with bioinformatics to identify novel C-glycosylpyra...

Bacilli are ubiquitous low G+C environmental Gram-positive bacteria that produce a wide assortment of specialized small molecules. Although their natural product biosynthetic potential is high, robust molecular tools to support the heterologous expression of large biosynthetic gene clusters in Bacillus hosts are rare. Herein we adapt transformation-associated recombination (TAR) in yeast to des...

Natural product discovery efforts have focused primarily on microbial biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) containing large multimodular polyketide synthases and nonribosomal peptide synthetases; however, sequencing of fungal genomes has revealed a vast number of BGCs containing smaller NRPS-like genes of unknown biosynthetic function. Using comparative metabolomics, we show that a BGC in the huma...

Plant metabolism underpins many traits of ecological and agronomic importance. Plants produce numerous compounds to cope with their environments but the biosynthetic pathways for most of these compounds have not yet been elucidated. To engineer and improve metabolic traits, we need comprehensive and accurate knowledge of the organization and regulation of plant metabolism at the genome scale. H...

Methane-oxidizing bacteria, aerobes that utilize methane as their sole carbon and energy source, are being increasingly studied for their environmentally significant ability to remove methane from the atmosphere. Their genomes indicate that they also have a robust and unusual secondary metabolism. Bioinformatic analysis of the Methylobacter tundripaludum genome identified biosynthetic gene clus...

Homologs of aflatoxin biosynthetic genes have been identified in the pine needle pathogen Dothistroma pini. D. pini produces dothistromin, a difuranoanthraquinone toxin with structural similarity to the aflatoxin precursor versicolorin B. Previous studies with purified dothistromin suggest a possible role for this toxin in pathogenicity. By using an aflatoxin gene as a hybridization probe, a ge...

paris polyphylla smith var. yunnanensis (liliaceae) is an important traditional medicinal plant of the yunnan province in china. however, the genomic information regarding this plant is limited. to further understand its molecular background, we conducted illumina hiseq 2000 second-generation sequencing of this plant species. approximately 30,198,679 reads with an average length of 202 bases we...