MariClus: Your One-Stop Platform for Information on Marine Natural Products, Their Gene Clusters and Producing Organisms
Cedric Hermans,
Maarten Lieven De Mol,
Marieke Mispelaere,
Anne-Sofie De Rop,
Jeltien Rombaut,
Tesneem Nusayr,
Rebecca Creamer,
Sofie L. De Maeseneire,
Wim K. Soetaert,
Paco Hulpiau
Affiliations
Cedric Hermans
Bioinformatics Knowledge Center (BiKC), Campus Brugge Station, Howest University of Applied Sciences, Rijselstraat 5, 8200 Bruges, Belgium
Maarten Lieven De Mol
Centre for Industrial Biotechnology and Biocatalysis (InBio.be), Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Marieke Mispelaere
Bioinformatics Knowledge Center (BiKC), Campus Brugge Station, Howest University of Applied Sciences, Rijselstraat 5, 8200 Bruges, Belgium
Anne-Sofie De Rop
Centre for Industrial Biotechnology and Biocatalysis (InBio.be), Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Jeltien Rombaut
Centre for Industrial Biotechnology and Biocatalysis (InBio.be), Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Tesneem Nusayr
Life Sciences, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi, TX 78412, USA
Rebecca Creamer
Entomology, Plant Pathology, and Weed Science, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA
Sofie L. De Maeseneire
Centre for Industrial Biotechnology and Biocatalysis (InBio.be), Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Wim K. Soetaert
Centre for Industrial Biotechnology and Biocatalysis (InBio.be), Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Paco Hulpiau
Bioinformatics Knowledge Center (BiKC), Campus Brugge Station, Howest University of Applied Sciences, Rijselstraat 5, 8200 Bruges, Belgium
Background: The marine environment hosts the vast majority of living species and marine microbes that produce natural products with great potential in providing lead compounds for drug development. With over 70% of Earth’s surface covered in water and the high interaction rate associated with liquid environments, this has resulted in many marine natural product discoveries. Our improved understanding of the biosynthesis of these molecules, encoded by gene clusters, along with increased genomic information will aid us in uncovering even more novel compounds. Results: We introduce MariClus (https://www.mariclus.com), an online user-friendly platform for mining and visualizing marine gene clusters. The first version contains information on clusters and the predicted molecules for over 500 marine-related prokaryotes. The user-friendly interface allows scientists to easily search by species, cluster type or molecule and visualize the information in table format or graphical representation. Conclusions: This new online portal simplifies the exploration and comparison of gene clusters in marine species for scientists and assists in characterizing the bioactive molecules they produce. MariClus integrates data from public sources, like GenBank, MIBiG and PubChem, with genome mining results from antiSMASH. This allows users to access and analyze various aspects of marine natural product biosynthesis and diversity.
