Mining Fungal Genomes for Bioactive Natural Product Discovery

Natural products, organic molecules synthesized by living organisms, have long served as a privileged source for drug discovery and development. However, traditional approaches to natural product discovery often suffer from inefficiencies and redundancies. In the genomic era, genome mining has emerged as a powerful and sustainable alternative strategy.

To accelerate 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 can comprehensively identify all putative BGCs within a given fungal genome and allows users to flexibly extract clusters according to their research interests. For example, FunBGCeX can identify BGCs encoding potential self-resistance enzymes, thereby facilitating the discovery of bioactive natural products with predictable biological activities.

In this talk, I will introduce the design and functionality of FunBGCeX and highlight representative natural products and biosynthetic enzymes discovered through its application, with a particular focus on previously undescribed bioactive molecules.