Diverse taxonomies for diverse chemistries: enhanced plant and fungal metabolic pathway annotation for natural product biosynthesis in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot
Year: 2019
Type: other
Abstract: The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB, https://www.uniprot.org ) is a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible resource of protein sequences and functional information. Here we describe our work on the enhanced annotation of plant and fungal pathways for natural product biosynthesis in UniProt using the Rhea resource of biochemical reactions ( https://www.rhea-db.org ). Plants and fungi produce an enormous variety of natural products with extremely diverse molecular structures and activities. These natural products may have interesting medicinal properties (as antibiotics, anti-cancer treatments, analgesics or immune-suppressive drugs) as well as applications in the agronomy (as insecticides, fungicides and more) food (as flavors or pigments for example) and energy sectors (biofuels). Linking these chemicals to their natural biosynthetic pathways in UniProt via Rhea will facilitate efforts to study their biology, and produce them and their derivatives at industrial scales. We will describe examples of curated pathways for compounds ranging from the first natural antibiotic isolated, the terpenoid mycophenolic acid of Penicillium species, through anti-cancer drugs such as vincristine and vinblastine in Catharanthus roseus , an exotic plant found only in Madagascar, to lycopadiene, a tetraterpenoid biofuels of the microalga Botryococcus braunii . These and many other examples highlight the incredible value that the careful study and curation of non-model organisms from all branches of the tree of life can provide.
Institution: SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4416517183