A Roadmap for Natural Product Discovery Based on Large-Scale Genomics and Metabolomics

Actinobacteria encode a wealth of natural product biosynthetic gene clusters (NPGCs), whose systematic study is complicated by numerous repetitive motifs. By combining several metrics we developed a method for global classification of these gene clusters into families (GCFs) and analyzed the biosynthetic capacity of Actinobacteria in 830 genome sequences, including 344 obtained for this project. The GCF network, comprised of 11,422 gene clusters grouped into 4,122 GCFs, was validated in hundreds of strains by correlating confident mass spectrometric detection of known small molecules with the presence/absence of their established biosynthetic gene clusters. The method also linked previously unassigned GCFs to known natural products, an approach that will enable de novo, bioassay-free discovery of novel natural products using large data sets. Extrapolation from the 830-genome dataset reveals that Actinobacteria encode hundreds of thousands of future drug leads, while the strong correlation between phylogeny and GCFs frames a roadmap to efficiently access them.