Natural Prodcast
Natural Prodcast is a podcast about natural products and the science and scientists of secondary metabolism. Natural products, secondary metabolites, specialized metabolites -- whatever you want to call them, they're the chemicals that make species unique and different from one another, and are incredibly important to medicine, the environment, and human health. Hosts Dan Udwary and Jackie Winter introduce concepts in this exciting field, and talk to the fascinating scientists who work in it. This series brought to you by the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute.
Natural Prodcast
Natural Prodcast Ep 11 - Marnix Medema
In this episode, Alison and I talk to Marnix Medema, from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Marnix and his collaborators have a fantastic set of software tools for exploring secondary metabolite biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Most people in the field are going to be familiar with AntiSMASH, which is available for analysis of your genomes on the web, or you can download a docker container or Anaconda/bioconda package or the source code and run it yourself on your own computer. MIBiG is a repository of experimentally characterized and manually annotated BGCs. And now BiG-SCAPE and/or BiG-SLICE can compare your gene clusters and group them into families, which you can also look at in BiG-FAM. This ecosystem for secondary metabolism has become transformative to the natural products community, and Marnix's enthusiasm for science and excitement about creating fantastic collaborative research projects is infectious. This episode should make a nice jumping-off point into the deeper end of genome mining after the Genome Mining Primer episode, last time. Transcript at https://jgi.doe.gov/natural-prodcast-episode-11-marnix-medema/