plantiSMASH 2.0: improvements to detection, annotation, and prioritization of plant biosynthetic gene clusters.
Pup ED, Owen C, Luo Z, Augustijn HE, Draisma A
Natural Product Discovery
PubMedHerbs, vegetables, and wildflowers around you are chemical factories — and this tool helps scientists decode exactly which genes make the compounds that could become tomorrow's medicines or natural pesticides.
Plants make thousands of useful chemicals — think of the scent of lavender, the bitterness of hops, or the healing properties of willow bark. Scientists have long suspected that the genes responsible for making these chemicals tend to be grouped together in a plant's DNA, like ingredients clustered on the same shelf. This upgraded software tool automatically scans a plant's entire genetic blueprint to find those clusters, now covering 430 different plant species and cataloguing over 30,000 potential chemical-making regions — making it far faster to discover new plant-based medicines and agricultural compounds.
Key Findings
plantiSMASH 2.0 now detects 12 distinct types of biosynthetic gene clusters, up from the original framework's smaller set.
The updated database catalogs 30,423 putative biosynthetic gene clusters across 430 plant genomes.
New features include substrate prediction for enzyme families and regulatory analysis via transcription factor binding site detection.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists have released a major upgrade to plantiSMASH, a computer tool that scans plant genomes to find clusters of genes responsible for producing beneficial natural compounds. Version 2.0 can now detect 12 types of gene clusters across 430 plant genomes, dramatically expanding our ability to discover new medicines, pesticides, and nutrients hidden in plant DNA.
Abstract Preview
Plants produce bioactive compounds as part of their specialized metabolism, with applications in medicine, agriculture, and nutrition. The biosynthesis of a growing number of these specialized meta...
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