New solutions for antibiotic discovery: Prioritizing microbial biosynthetic space using ecology and machine learning.

Journal: PLoS biology
PMID:

Abstract

With the explosive increase in genome sequence data, perhaps the major challenge in natural-product-based drug discovery is the identification of gene clusters most likely to specify new chemistry and bioactivities. We discuss the challenges and state-of-the-art of antibiotic discovery based on ecological principles, genome mining and artificial intelligence.

Authors

  • Marnix H Medema
    Bioinformatics Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands. marnix.medema@wur.nl.
  • Gilles P van Wezel
    Department of Molecular Biotechnology, Institute of Biology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.