Insights from a global view of secondary metabolism: Small molecules from the human microbiota

The discovery of natural products – small molecules from microbes often used as drugs – has been an ad hoc pursuit for almost a century. The rapidly growing database of microbial genome sequences offers new opportunities to leverage genomics and bioinformatics toward discovering natural products and characterizing their roles in mediating interspecies interactions. This seminar will describe two convergent, ongoing lines of research: our use of genomics and bioinformatics to identify biosynthetic gene clusters and predict the structures of their small molecule products, and our efforts to identify and characterize small molecules produced by the human microbiota.