I am super excited to share with you a new publication! During my postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern, I worked to combine genomic fingerprints of fungi (which describe the biosynthetic pathways present in fungi and gives a snapshot of their biosynthetic potential) with their metabolomic profiles (which provide a molecular fingerprint of all of the molecules that are actually being produced under a given set of experimental conditions. By using both metabolomics and genomics, it is possible to link natural product molecules to their biosynthetic pathways, gain insight into ecological function, and more.
After years of hard work and a multi-institutional collaboration of close to 20 authors, we have finally published our findings and translated "metabologenomics" to a large fungal dataset for the first time!
We show that data processing is extremely important, but with the right parameters, we can identify known linkages from the literature with high success. We also apply our method to unknowns, and find the true biosynthetic pathway for the bioactive pestalamide family of natural products, correcting prior literature, and highlighting the promise of this application for exploring fungal biosynthesis on an unprecedented scale. We identify hundreds of promising hits for future discovery, some of which are being explored right now by Lexie and Ashley in the lab!
Read more here: https://t.co/2RSE1ERtRm (free to read)
If you subscribe to Nature, you can download the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-023-01276-8
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