Bacterial resistance has become a major health threat that needs urgent action to maintain the advances of modern medicine. There is an urgent need to discover new bioactive natural compounds such as decalin-forming macrolides which have antibacterial potency and unique mode of action. Genome mining has become an important method to identify novel candidates of natural products through an efficient computational frameworks which utilize algorithms such as antiSMASH, BiG-SCPAE And CORASON. Through analysing ~15% of all available bacterial genomes, we have identified several potential new decalin-forming macrolide biosynthetic gene clusters. The most promising candidate is a BGC within the genome of Streptomyces tsukubaensis which contains all PKS genes of nargenicin and streptoseomycin a...[ Read more ]

Bacterial resistance has become a major health threat that needs urgent action to maintain the advances of modern medicine. There is an urgent need to discover new bioactive natural compounds such as decalin-forming macrolides which have antibacterial potency and unique mode of action. Genome mining has become an important method to identify novel candidates of natural products through an efficient computational frameworks which utilize algorithms such as antiSMASH, BiG-SCPAE And CORASON. Through analysing ~15% of all available bacterial genomes, we have identified several potential new decalin-forming macrolide biosynthetic gene clusters. The most promising candidate is a BGC within the genome of Streptomyces tsukubaensis which contains all PKS genes of nargenicin and streptoseomycin and maintains the overall modular structure.