Abstract
Plants produce a vast diversity of specialized metabolites, which play important roles in the interactions with their microbiome, as well as with animals and other plants. Many such molecules have valuable biological activities that render them (potentially) useful as medicines, flavors and fragrances, nutritional ingredients, or cosmetics. Recently, plant scientists have discovered that the genes for many biosynthetic pathways for the production of such specialized metabolites are physically clustered on the chromosome within biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). The Plant Secondary Metabolite Analysis Shell (plantiSMASH) allows for the automated identification of such plant BGCs, facilitates comparison of BGCs across genomes, and helps users to predict the functional interactions of pairs of genes within and between BGCs based on coexpression analysis. In this chapter, we provide a detailed protocol on how to install and run plantiSMASH, and how to interpret its results to draw biological conclusions that are supported by the data.
Key words
- Specialized metabolite
- Secondary metabolite
- Biosynthetic gene cluster
- Biosynthetic pathway
- Plant
- Genomic
- Bioinformatics
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a VENI grant [863.15.002 to M.H.M.] from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and by the Graduate School for Experimental Plant Sciences (EPS).
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Kautsar, S.A., Suarez Duran, H.G., Medema, M.H. (2018). Genomic Identification and Analysis of Specialized Metabolite Biosynthetic Gene Clusters in Plants Using PlantiSMASH. In: Fauser, F., Jonikas, M. (eds) Plant Chemical Genomics. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1795. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7874-8_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7874-8_15
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