Dr Kai Blin, Researcher, Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark, will present a lecture entitled: The antiSMASH platform, a collection of web-based tools to hunt for interesting metabolites in bacterial genomes

Host:     Andrew Page

Abstract:
Secondary metabolites produced by microorganisms are the main source of bioactive compounds that are in use as antimicrobial and anticancer drugs, fungicides, herbicides and pesticides. As an increasing number of microorganisms are becoming resistant against the antimicrobial compounds currently in use, there is a dire need for new compounds and compound classes that show new modes of action to avoid the current resistance mechanisms. In the last decade, the increasing availability of microbial genomes has established genome mining as a very important method for the identification of biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) responsible for producing such novel compounds.

This talk will present the popular antiSMASH platform, consisting of the antiSMASH microbial genome mining tool, the companion database with precalculated results for > 24,000 bacterial genomes, and some related tools. The talk will discuss how antiSMASH fits into a drug discovery pipeline and where further bioinformatics tools are needed to speed up discovery and help us avoid entering the post-antibiotics era.

All staff from organisations on the Norwich Research Park are welcome to attend.