Comprehensive annotation of secondary metabolite biosynthetic genes and gene clusters of Aspergillus nidulans, A. fumigatus, A. niger and A. oryzae

BMC Microbiology

Research Article

Gustavo C Cerqueira¹  Jennifer R Wortman¹  Prachi Shah²  Martha B Arnaud²  Farrell Wymore²  Gavin Sherlock²  Marek S Skrzypek²  Diane O Inglis²  Jonathan Binkley² 

[1]Broad Institute, 7 Cambridge Center, 02141, Cambridge, MA, USA

[2]Department of Genetics, Stanford University Medical School, 94305-5120, Stanford, CA, USA

关键词: Aspergillus;    Gene clusters;    Gene Ontology;    Genome annotation;    Secondary metabolism;    Sybil;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2180-13-91

 received in 2013-02-15, accepted in 2013-04-15,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundSecondary metabolite production, a hallmark of filamentous fungi, is an expanding area of research for the Aspergilli. These compounds are potent chemicals, ranging from deadly toxins to therapeutic antibiotics to potential anti-cancer drugs. The genome sequences for multiple Aspergilli have been determined, and provide a wealth of predictive information about secondary metabolite production. Sequence analysis and gene overexpression strategies have enabled the discovery of novel secondary metabolites and the genes involved in their biosynthesis. The Aspergillus Genome Database (AspGD) provides a central repository for gene annotation and protein information for Aspergillus species. These annotations include Gene Ontology (GO) terms, phenotype data, gene names and descriptions and they are crucial for interpreting both small- and large-scale data and for aiding in the design of new experiments that further Aspergillus research.ResultsWe have manually curated Biological Process GO annotations for all genes in AspGD with recorded functions in secondary metabolite production, adding new GO terms that specifically describe each secondary metabolite. We then leveraged these new annotations to predict roles in secondary metabolism for genes lacking experimental characterization. As a starting point for manually annotating Aspergillus secondary metabolite gene clusters, we used antiSMASH (antibiotics and Secondary Metabolite Analysis SHell) and SMURF (Secondary Metabolite Unknown Regions Finder) algorithms to identify potential clusters in A. nidulans, A. fumigatus, A. niger and A. oryzae, which we subsequently refined through manual curation.ConclusionsThis set of 266 manually curated secondary metabolite gene clusters will facilitate the investigation of novel Aspergillus secondary metabolites.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Inglis et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.