Using antiSMASH

Abstract

Natural products produced by microorganisms are widely used in cosmetics, drugs, agrochemicals and more. Traditionally, they were discovered using a labour-intensive chemical discovery pipeline. With the advent of affordable genome sequencing technologies, it has become feasible to complement the traditional approach with computational tools that look for the biosynthetic pathways of interesting compounds in the genomic data, an approach called genome mining. Since its initial release in 2011, antiSMASH has established itself as the most popular tool for microbial natural product genome mining. Here, we present how version 8 of antiSMASH works and can be used for genome mining tasks.

Keywords: Genome mining; Natural products; Secondary metabolites; Specialised metabolites; antiSMASH.