Natural Products Genome Mining
Our research group focuses on developing and implementing novel methods to effectively identify and characterize bioactive molecules for diverse applications in medicine, sustainable agriculture, and food safety. Our team brings together expertise from various disciplines, including chemistry, bioinformatics, and metabolic engineering to achieve our common objective.
What we try to achieve
Microbial Natural Products play a tremendous role in our everyday life: These compounds serve as essential drugs for treating life-threatening diseases but in addition also have other important applications, including crop protection, enhancing plant resistance, and preventing food decay. Our team focuses on developing and implementing innovative software and experimental tools to efficiently identify and characterize novel natural products for such applications, with a strong focus on finding more sustainable alternatives for currently used solutions.
Why our research is important and how it can be used
Antimicrobial resistance poses a significant threat to human health, particularly as the pipeline for new antibiotics is at risk of depletion. Phytopathogenic fungi, insects, and microorganisms that spoil food contribute to substantial losses in both raw grains and processed foods. We urgently require effective treatments and sustainable alternatives that can replace existing products while minimizing their environmental impact. Our software framework antiSMASH, which we develop in collaboration with international partners, is used by thousands of scientists world-wide.
How we achieve our aims – methods, tools, technologies
We use an integrated approach that spans across various scientific disciplines: We isolate and sequence novel microorganisms, develop software (antiSMASH, BGCflow, UmetaFlow) and databases (antiSMASH-DB, MIBiG) to mine these sequencing datasets for biosynthetic gene clusters that code for the biosynthesis of such compounds. We integrate transcriptomics and metabolomics data to identify new compounds, and develop and use metabolic engineering strategies, such as CRISPR genome editing or BGC cloning and expression to produce the molecules.
Software, databases and molecular tools provided to the scientific community:
- antiSMASH: https://antismash.secondarymetabolites.org
- antiSMASH database: https://antismash-db.secondarymetabolites.org
- MIBiG reference repository: https://mibig.secondarymetbolites.org
- CRISPy-web: https://crispy.secondarymetabolites.org
- BGCFlow: https://github.com/NBChub/bgcflow
- UmetaFlow: https://github.com/biosustain/snakemake_UmetaFlow
- Actinomycete CRISPR engineering tools: https://www.addgene.org/Tilmann_Weber/
The group is headed by Prof. Tilmann Weber and is located at Lyngby Campus, building 220, floor 3, PI office 327D
Contact
Tilmann Weber Professor tiwe@biosustain.dtu.dk