The Role of the Microbiome in Cancer and the Development of Cancer Therapeutics.

Cancer is caused by a compilation of hereditary and environmental factors. In the past decade, next-generation sequencing has revealed the extent to which the microbiome influences the maintenance of homeostasis and therefore the prevention of diseases such as cancer. Current research efforts explore the interaction between cancer and the microbiome, and the results are anticipated to transform how clinicians approach cancer treatment.

Genome mining of biosynthetic and chemotherapeutic gene clusters in Streptomyces bacteria.

Streptomyces bacteria are known for their prolific production of secondary metabolites, many of which have been widely used in human medicine, agriculture and animal health. To guide the effective prioritization of specific biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) for drug development and targeting the most prolific producer strains, knowledge about phylogenetic relationships of Streptomyces species, genome-wide diversity and distribution patterns of BGCs is critical. We used genomic and phylogenetic methods to elucidate the diversity of major classes of BGCs in 1,110 publicly available Streptomyces genomes.