Sequencing of secondary metabolite gene clusters by our group and many other groups worldwide led to a huge amount of sequence data of genes involved in natural product biosynthesis. In the bioinformatics project we develop tools to mine these data.
We have developed CLUSEAN, an annotation and sequence analysis platform that allows a fast and very easy primary assembly and annotation of secondary metabolite biosynthesis gene clusters. This pipeline is used to assemble and annotate all clusters isolated and sequenced within the cluster V of the BMBF "GenoMik" framework and within the GenBioCom Consortium (Weber, et al., 2009, J. Biotechnol. 140, 13-17).
CLUSEAN is Open Source software and can be obtained at the download page.
In a collaboration project with Christian Rausch, Daniel Huson, Marc Röttig and Oliver Kohlbacher (ZBiT) we contibuted to a novel method to improve the prediction of the substrate specificities of non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS), the NRPSpredictor (Rausch et al., 2005, Nucleic Acids Res. 33, 5799-5808; Röttig et al., 2011, Nucleic Acids Res. 39, W362-367).
A WWW-Version of the latest version of NRPSpredictor and detailed information is available here.
Our latest project, the "antibiotics and Secondary Metabolites Analysis SHell" antiSMASH aims at integrating all available bioinformatics tools and methods in a single, user friedly system that allows genome-scale analyses and genome mining of secondary metabolites producers. antiSMASH is developed in collaboration with Eriko Takano, Rainer Breitling and Marnix Medema from Groningen University and Michael Fischbach from UCSF.
The antiSMASH webinterface as well as a download version can be found at the antiSMASH homepage.
