Section: New Results

Nonribosomal peptides

We were invited to contribute in a volume of “Methods in Molecular Biology” by authoring a chapter focusing on NRPS biosynthesis. This chapter [32] was about the use of the Norine platform (developed by the team) and other bioinformatics tools for the analysis of nonribosomal peptide synthetases and their products. We invited our collaborator from Denmark, Tilmann Weber, to complete this chapter with the introduction of his tool, antiSMASH.

We annotated 48 genomes of Burkholderia species using our annotation protocol, that starts from a genome sequence and goes to the predicted nonribosomal peptides. We have predicted 161 gene clusters producing nonribosomal peptides, leading to the synthesis of not only already known peptides, but also new ones [22] with potential applications in biocontrol.

A new version of the Norine interface is now available. The form to query the annotations is now flexible and dynamic. The user can build his own query to search for annotations in several fields combined by boolean operators. Moreover, the database structure has been modified to allow, among others, a hierarchical representation of the NRPS taxonomy. Finally, the MyNorine tool has been enhanced and updated to take into account these changes and the description page of the peptides has been reorganized.