BiG-FAM

BiG-FAM organizes biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) into Gene Cluster Families (GCFs) to capture global biosynthetic diversity across microbial genomes and metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) for comparative analysis and natural product discovery.

Key Features:

• Extensive Database Coverage: Contains 29,955 GCFs derived from 1,225,071 BGCs predicted across 209,206 microbial genomes and MAGs.
• Facilitation of Novelty Assessment: Groups homologous BGCs into GCFs to enable dereplication against known functional clusters and assess the novelty of putative BGCs.
• Multi-Criterion Search Functionality: Supports multi-criterion searches within GCFs to identify BGCs based on specified parameters.
• Integration with Existing Databases: Links GCFs to established BGC resources such as antiSMASH-DB.
• Rapid Annotation of User-Supplied Data: Assigns user-supplied antiSMASH results to existing GCFs for rapid annotation and comparison.

Scientific Applications:

• Natural Product Discovery: Enables investigation of secondary metabolic potential to identify and characterize novel natural products.
• Microbial Genomics: Provides insights into the diversity, distribution, and taxonomy of BGCs across microbial species.
• Metagenomics: Facilitates exploration of biosynthetic capabilities encoded in environmental metagenomic samples and MAGs.

Methodology:

Computational prediction of BGCs from publicly available microbial genomes and MAGs followed by organization into Gene Cluster Families (GCFs) and comparative dereplication analyses.