S156: Berkeley Lab synthetic biology enabling technologies for natural products

Emerging synthetic biology enabling technologies may soon uncover a wealth of hitherto inaccessible natural products. While approximately 3% of microbial genomes encode natural product clusters, and only a minor fraction of those sequenced to date are directly related to characterized clusters, most clusters are either transcriptionally silent under laboratory conditions or reside in unculturable organisms. What are all of these clusters producing, and how can we leverage this untapped biosynthetic capacity? At Berkeley Lab, we are in the process of building a genomes to natural products pipeline that circumvents the native transcriptional silencing and template DNA requirement challenges that have often hindered efforts to date. Here, the overall vision for the pipeline will be presented, along with several of the pipeline’s software, DNA synthesis, and analytical components, which are broadly available to the community beyond this natural products effort.