The biochemical and genetic basis how basidiomycetes synthesize bioactive natural products has largely remained elusive, which is why we searched for a representative compound and species to investigate their natural product assembly biochemically. Previous feeding experiments suggest that basidiomycete terphenylquinones and the asterriquinones, produced by Aspergilli and various Ascomycetes, share a common biosynthetic principle, which is deamination and dimerization of two aromatic amino acids. Recently, the first genetic locus for an asterriquinone, the clustered terrequinone genes tdiA–E, was identified during a genome-wide screen in Aspergillus nidulans. With this data available, we screened a genomic cosmid library of the basidiomycete brown-rotter Tapinella panuoides for orthologs and identified candidate genes for terphenylquinone biosynthesis. Their function was confirmed biochemically: atrA codes for a nonribosomal peptide synthetase-like tri-domain enzyme, and atrD for a transaminase.