Computational Omics Analysis Of Biosynthetic Diversity: From Natural Product Discovery To Microbiome Ecology

Plants, fungi and bacteria produce a wealth of specialized metabolites, wich are of great importance from both ecological and clinical perspectives. Due to the accelerated accumulation of omics data, computacional methods have become more and more important to identify these molecules and to assess their biological activities. Here, I will highlith the work performed in my research group on using these approaches to accelerate natural product discovery, as well as to study microbe-microbe and host-microbe interactions in human, plant and animal microbiomes. Specifically, I will discuss the use of sequence similarity networking approaches to investigate biosynthetic diversity across large numbers of genomes, and integrative genome/metabolome mining to link gene clusters to molecules.