The SIO-Bioinformatics User Group would like to invite you to a talk by Professor Nadine Ziemert on Monday November 7, 2016 at 12:30pm in Hubbs Hall 4500.

Professor Ziemert completed her post-doc here at SIO and went on to a professorship position at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, where her lab is currently working at the intersection of bioinformatics, microbiology and phylogenetics. Prof. Ziemert’s talk will highlight her lab’s work on developing “Evolution based computational tools for drug discovery in Actinomycetes”

If you would like to meet with Nadine while she is here, please email mschorn at ucsd.edu.

Abstract:

Next generation sequencing methods have made sequencing faster, cheaper, and easier than ever and have revolutionized almost every field of biology. The constantly growing volume of DNA sequence data has made genome mining an important tool for the detection and prediction of promising secondary metabolites and has lead to a renaissance in natural product based drug discovery. Thousands of putative gene clusters are available in public databases such as NCBI and JGI-ABC, the challenge being now to triage the most promising pathways to guide laborious wet-lab experiments, assist with the dereplication of already known compounds and predict interesting bioactivities based on genomic data.

Here we introduce a selection of computational tools currently in development by the Ziemert lab that are based on the evolution of secondary metabolites and can be used for a rapid automated identification and examination of novel biosynthetic gene clusters. We highlight first results of mining rare and underexplored actinomycete genera for promising natural compounds.