BiG-CoDeC: Biosynthetic Genomics Community-Driven Curation

Natural metabolites are rich sources of medicines and crop protection agents. We have built open-source software tools for large-scale ‘genome mining’ of novel metabolites, connected to an online community-driven repository that has become the gold standard database for curated experimentally characterised biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) encoding the production of these molecules. This repository, MIBiG, has been compiled through open science initiatives, which were successful but require professionalisation. To address this, we propose two main goals: increasing community submission and annotation of BGC data through improved online systems, and incentivizing data re-use by facilitating automated querying and interoperability with other resources.