Genome Mining in Fungi

The explosion of genomic data available in the post-genomic era has caused a paradigm shift for many scientific fields, including natural product discovery and biosynthesis. Bioinformatic analysis of genome information accumulated for filamentous fungi has revealed tremendous untapped metabolic potentials of these natural product producers. The genomes encode far more biosynthetic gene clusters than natural products that have been isolated. Most of the natural product encoding gene clusters are silent or cryptic, under typical laboratory culturing conditions. Developing methods to harvest this unrealized biosynthetic potential are therefore attractive towards expanding natural product diversity and bioactivities. Efforts toward these goals are collectively referred to as “genome mining” and incorporate some of the most cutting-edge synthetic biology tools. This article serves to provide an overview and update on the recent progress in fungal genome mining. The common workflow of fungal genome mining will be summarized, followed by discussion of different approaches in detail. Representative examples from various approaches will be highlighted to illustrate the technology advancement, as well as limitations.