Ben Kuipers

Elucidating biosynthetic pathways related to the synthesis of small halogenated peptidic natural products in marine sponge microbiomes

The present work queried metagenomes of several sponge species by making use of a minimal set of core enzymes that postulate to be necessary to produce small peptidic NPs, revealing a variety of novel BGC architectures, many of which showed conservation among sponge host phylogenies and were encoded in the genomes of diverse sponge-associated bacteria.