Publications by authors named "Philip N Rees"
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
October 2016
Article Synopsis
- * Despite genome sequencing showing many genetically encoded natural products are still unknown, existing bioinformatics tools have been developed to predict nonribosomal peptides and polyketides from sequence data, while RiPPs remain poorly understood due to their complexity.
- * The study introduces a new algorithm that catalogs RiPP biosynthetic gene clusters, uncovering 30,261 RiPP clusters from over 65,000 prokaryotic genomes, leading to the identification of a rare
Nat Chem Biol
December 2016
Article Synopsis
- - Polyketides (PKs) and nonribosomal peptides (NRPs) are vital natural products and form the basis for many important therapies, with over 11,000 known structures identified through past research.
- - While genome sequencing is revealing new PK and NRP gene clusters rapidly, only about 10% are linked to specific molecules, leaving many "orphan" clusters uncharacterized.
- - The study introduces two new tools: the generalized retro-biosynthetic assembly prediction engine (GRAPE) and the global alignment for natural products cheminformatics (GARLIC), aimed at systematically identifying orphan gene clusters and predicting their associated molecules.
Article Synopsis
- Antibiotics are crucial for treating bacterial infections, but their overuse has caused resistance, leading to a need for new antibacterial agents with different targets.
- Most current antibacterial drugs come from natural products found in microbes, but there's a lack of organization in this data, hindering research efforts.
- The study introduces a new resource to classify natural antibacterials and applies a method to uncover previously unknown antibacterial mechanisms, finding that telomycin from Streptomyces canus works through a unique target related to bacterial phospholipids.
Nucleic Acids Res
November 2015
Article Synopsis
- Microbial natural products are key sources of bioactive compounds but face challenges due to the high rediscovery of known metabolites in traditional screening methods.
- PRISM is a new computational tool that identifies biosynthetic gene clusters and predicts novel chemical structures like nonribosomal peptides and polyketides, enhancing the search for new natural products.
- It offers a user-friendly, open-source platform with advanced algorithms for accurate predictions, available online for researchers to utilize.
