Diversity of natural product biosynthetic gene clusters in antarctic microbiomes through genome-centric analysis

Abstract

Microorganisms inhabiting extreme environments are supposed to encode secondary metabolites as a survival strategy for thriving under harsh environmental conditions. Such environments harbor an unexplored potential for the discovery of new chemical compounds which could lead to new drugs. Antarctic environments have been particularly overlooked and the biosynthetic potential of soil microbial communities from the Antarctic Peninsula has been under-explored. During the development of the current project (FAPESP 2020/11534-0), we described the diversity of biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) along spatial and temporal gradients in Whalers Bay soil in Deception Island - Antarctica using sequence-based analyses. These findings shed light on the vast potential for secondary metabolites biosynthesis in soil microbial communities from Whalers Bay. However, the identified BGCs are often not complete and only a very small fraction of the short read sequence data can be assembled into contigs long enough to allow the identification of BGC classes. Here, we propose a joint project between the research group in the Microbial Resources Division of the Research Center for Chemistry, Biology, and Agriculture (CPQBA) of the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and the Translational Genome Mining for Natural Products of the University of Tübingen (Germany). Under the joint supervision of Prof. Dr. Valéria de Oliveira and Prof. Dr. Nadine Ziemert, we will identify natural product biosynthetic gene clusters, evaluate their distribution in the environment, and prioritize biosynthetic genes with the potential to exhibit novelty bioactive function through genome-based analysis. (AU)