Uncovering secondary metabolite evolution and biosynthesis using gene cluster networks and genetic dereplication.

The increased interest in secondary metabolites (SMs) has driven a number of genome sequencing projects to elucidate their biosynthetic pathways. As a result, studies revealed that the number of secondary metabolite gene clusters (SMGCs) greatly outnumbers detected compounds, challenging current methods to dereplicate and categorize this amount of gene clusters on a larger scale. Here, we present an automated workflow for the genetic dereplication and analysis of secondary metabolism genes in fungi.