Genome Mining-Guided Discovery of Fungal Natural Products Using FunBGCeX

In the genomic era, traditional approaches to natural product discovery often face significant inefficiencies, whereas genome mining-driven strategies have emerged as powerful and sustainable alternatives. To advance the exploration of fungal natural products and uncover unusual biosynthetic mechanisms, we recently developed FunBGCeX, a fungal genome mining tool that detects biosynthetic proteins based on our manually curated database of fungal natural product biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs), the FunBGCs database. FunBGCeX is capable of identifying all putative BGCs in a given fungal genome and allows users to flexibly extract BGCs according to their research needs, such as retrieving clusters encoding homologues of specific proteins of interest. In this talk, I will introduce the design and functionality of FunBGCeX and highlight representative natural products and biosynthetic enzymes discovered through its application.