Recent development of computational resources for new antibiotics discovery

Abstract

Understanding a complex working mechanism of biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) encoding secondary metabolites is a key to discovery of new antibiotics. Computational resources continue to be developed in order to better process increasing volumes of genome and chemistry data, and thereby better understand BGCs. In this context, this review highlights recent advances in computational resources for secondary metabolites with emphasis on genome mining, compound identification and dereplication as well as databases. We also introduce an updated version of Secondary Metabolite Bioinformatics Portal (SMBP; http://www.secondarymetabolites.org), which we previously released as a curated gateway to all the computational tools and databases useful for discovery and engineering of secondary metabolites.