CLUSEAN: A computer-based framework for the automated analysis of bacterial secondary metabolite biosynthetic gene clusters

摘要

Bacterial secondary metabolites are an important source of antimicrobial and cytostatic drugs. These molecules are often synthesized in a stepwise fashion by multimodular megaenzymes that are encoded in clusters of genes encoding enzymes for precursor supply and modification. In this work, we present an open source software pipeline, CLUSEAN ([underlined text: CLU]ster [underlined text: SE]quence [underlined text: AN]alyzer) that helps to annotate and analyze such gene clusters. CLUSEAN integrates standard analysis tools, like BLAST and HMMer, with specific tools for the identification of the functional domains and motifs in nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS)/type I polyketide synthases (PKS) and the prediction of specificities of NRPS.