Dataset Information

CASSIS and SMIPS: promoter-based prediction of secondary metabolite gene clusters in eukaryotic genomes.

ABSTRACT: Secondary metabolites (SM) are structurally diverse natural products of high pharmaceutical importance. Genes involved in their biosynthesis are often organized in clusters, i.e., are co-localized and co-expressed. In silico cluster prediction in eukaryotic genomes remains problematic mainly due to the high variability of the clusters' content and lack of other distinguishing sequence features.We present Cluster Assignment by Islands of Sites (CASSIS), a method for SM cluster prediction in eukaryotic genomes, and Secondary Metabolites by InterProScan (SMIPS), a tool for genome-wide detection of SM key enzymes ('anchor' genes): polyketide synthases, non-ribosomal peptide synthetases and dimethylallyl tryptophan synthases. Unlike other tools based on protein similarity, CASSIS exploits the idea of co-regulation of the cluster genes, which assumes the existence of common regulatory patterns in the cluster promoters. The method searches for 'islands' of enriched cluster-specific motifs in the vicinity of anchor genes. It was validated in a series of cross-validation experiments and showed high sensitivity and specificity.CASSIS and SMIPS are freely available at https://sbi.hki-jena.de/cassisthomas.wolf@leibniz-hki.de or ekaterina.shelest@leibniz-hki.deSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

SUBMITTER: Wolf T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4824125 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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CASSIS and SMIPS: promoter-based prediction of secondary metabolite gene clusters in eukaryotic genomes.

Wolf Thomas T Shelest Vladimir V Nath Neetika N Shelest Ekaterina E

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) 20151209 8

<h4>Motivation</h4>Secondary metabolites (SM) are structurally diverse natural products of high pharmaceutical importance. Genes involved in their biosynthesis are often organized in clusters, i.e., are co-localized and co-expressed. In silico cluster prediction in eukaryotic genomes remains problematic mainly due to the high variability of the clusters' content and lack of other distinguishing sequence features.<h4>Results</h4>We present Cluster Assignment by Islands of Sites (CASSIS), a method ...[more]

PMID: 26656005

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Heterologous expression of secondary metabolite gene clusters is used to achieve increased production of desired compounds, activate cryptic gene clusters, manipulate clusters from genetically unamenable strains, obtain natural products from uncultivable species, create new unnatural pathways, etc. Several Streptomyces species are genetically engineered for use as hosts for heterologous expression of gene clusters. S. lividans TK24 is one of the most studied and genetically tractable actinobacteria, which remain untapped. It was therefore important to generate S. lividans chassis strains with clean metabolic backgrounds. RESULTS:In this study, we generated a set of S. lividans chassis strains by deleting endogenous gene clusters and introducing additional φC31 attB loci for site-specific integration of foreign DNA. In addition to the simplified metabolic background, the engineered S. lividans strains had better growth characteristics than the parental strain in liquid production medium. The utility of the developed strains was validated by expressing four secondary metabolite gene clusters responsible for the production of different classes of natural products. Engineered strains were found to be superior to the parental strain in production of heterologous natural products. Furthermore, S. lividans-based strains were better producers of amino acid-based natural products than other tested common hosts. Expression of a Streptomyces albus subsp. chlorinus NRRL B-24108 genomic library in the modified S. lividans ΔYA9 and S. albus Del14 strains resulted in the production of 7 potentially new compounds, only one of which was produced in both strains. CONCLUSION:The constructed S. lividans-based strains are a great complement to the panel of heterologous hosts for actinobacterial secondary metabolite gene expression. The expansion of the number of such engineered strains will contribute to an increased success rate in isolation of new natural products originating from the expression of genomic and metagenomic libraries, thus raising the chance to obtain novel biologically active compounds.

Dataset Information

CASSIS and SMIPS: promoter-based prediction of secondary metabolite gene clusters in eukaryotic genomes.

Publications

CASSIS and SMIPS: promoter-based prediction of secondary metabolite gene clusters in eukaryotic genomes.

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