Natural Prodcast Ep 11 - Marnix Medema

Natural Prodcast

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/