Meeting 47, 2023-04-21

When is the meeting?	21-April-2023 at 10.00 - 11.00
Where is the meeting?	Zoom video-conference: http://meet.nbis.se/aiaio
What is the meeting about?	(Meta)genome mining approaches for novel secondary metabolite discovery
Who is the responsible presenter?	Laura Carroll, DDLS fellow Epidemiology and Biology of Infection, Umeå University

Abstract: Secondary metabolites (SMs) produced by microbes have critically important roles in human health. While some SMs can be leveraged as essential therapeutics (e.g., antimicrobials, anticancer agents), others have negative impacts on host health (e.g., toxins, carcinogens, pathogen virulence factors). A large proportion of the enzymatic pathways responsible for SM production are encoded by physically clustered groups of genes called biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). (Meta)genomic data derived from microbes thus offers tremendous potential as a reservoir for novel BGCs associated with novel SMs. Here, we discuss recent advances in (meta)genome mining approaches for BGC detection, with an emphasis on machine learning (ML)-based BGC discovery approaches. We demonstrate our novel ML-based BGC discovery tool, GECCO, which overcomes many of the shortcomings associated with existing methods. Finally, we showcase how GECCO scales to millions of microbial (meta)genomes, allowing us to gain insights into the biosynthet

Presentation: Slides