bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/036087; this version posted January 7, 2016. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. 1 Automating Assessment of the Undiscovered 2 Biosynthetic Potential of Actinobacteria 3 Bogdan Tokovenko1*, Yuriy Rebets1, Andriy Luzhetskyy1,2* 4 1 Actinomycetes Metabolic Engineering Group, Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research 5 Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany 6 2 Department of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Technology, University of 7 Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany 8 * Corresponding author 9 E-mail:
[email protected] (AL),
[email protected] (BT) 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/036087; this version posted January 7, 2016. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. 1 Abstract 2 Background. Biosynthetic potential of Actinobacteria has long been the subject of theoretical estimates. 3 Such an estimate is indeed important as a test of further exploitability of a taxon or group of taxa for new 4 therapeutics. As neither a set of available genomes nor a set of bacterial cultivation methods are static, it 5 makes sense to simplify as much as possible and to improve reproducibility of biosynthetic gene clusters 6 similarity, diversity, and abundance estimations.