Marnix Medema
@marnixmedema.bsky.social
2K followers 290 following 42 posts
Professor of Bioinformatics at Wageningen University, Visiting professor at Leiden University. Natural product discovery, microbiomes, method development.
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marnixmedema.bsky.social
Very important initiative! This could really help facilitate increasing data sharing as well as appropriate attribution of data creation.
alexjprobst.bsky.social
New article on equitable reuse of public sequencing data, published in @natmicrobiol.nature.com!
Led by the Data reuse core team @lhug.bsky.social @environmicrobio.bsky.social Cristina Moraru, @geomicrosoares.bsky.social, @folker.bsky.social and with Anke Heyer and The Data Reuse Consotrium!
Reposted by Marnix Medema
nadineziemert.bsky.social
Happy to share our newest preprint. PhyloNaP as a user friendly database of phylogeny for enzymes involved in natural product production and as public repository for well curated phylogenetic trees. Happy Tree Building!!!
#phylogeny #secmet #bioinformatics

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
PhyloNaP: a user-friendly database of Phylogeny for Natural Product-producing enzymes
Phylogenetic analysis is widely used to predict enzyme function, yet building annotated and reusable trees is labor-intensive and requires extensive knowledge about the specific enzymes. Existing reso...
www.biorxiv.org
marnixmedema.bsky.social
Awesome work, @mmzdouc.bsky.social !
mmzdouc.bsky.social
Aaand it's out! Meet MITE - the natural product tailoring enzyme database, just published in @narjournal.bsky.social! MITE DB captures the substrate- and reaction-specificity of tailoring enzymes, allowing to capture this information in a human- and machine-readable way! doi.org/10.1093/nar/...
Reposted by Marnix Medema
mmzdouc.bsky.social
Aaand it's out! Meet MITE - the natural product tailoring enzyme database, just published in @narjournal.bsky.social! MITE DB captures the substrate- and reaction-specificity of tailoring enzymes, allowing to capture this information in a human- and machine-readable way! doi.org/10.1093/nar/...
marnixmedema.bsky.social
Thanks to Chunxu Song and the CAU for great partnership and collaboration, and Jos Raaijmakers (NIOO-KNAW) and Liesje Mommer (WUR) for their crucial roles in advising the work.
marnixmedema.bsky.social
Also, catabolic gene cluster absence/presence profiles were shown to be strongly predictive of rhizosphere competence, even more so than a dataset of experimental assays of catabolic potential. 4/4
marnixmedema.bsky.social
Running rhizoSMASH on a large collection of plant- and soil-associated genomes enabled charting the first map of root-associated catabolic functions across key plant-associated microbial taxa. 3/4
marnixmedema.bsky.social
Similar as for antiSMASH and later gutSMASH, Yuze curated a set of profile HMMs and detection rules to reliably identify these gene clusters, guided by sequence similarity network analysis to distinguish true positives from false positives accurately. 2/4
Reposted by Marnix Medema
bielleogy.bsky.social
Giving a webinar on #BlueSoup this Friday, in case anyone wants to pop in during their lunch!
A promotional flyer for a webinar in the CSU Bioinformatics Webinar Series. On the left side, it shows the date and time: “26 Sep | 12 PM PST.” It includes instructions to join via Zoom with Meeting ID: 886 2442 3158 and a QR code above. On the right, there is a photo of Dr. Elinne Becket, Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at California State University San Marcos, sitting outdoors with plants and trees in the background. Below, the title of the talk is displayed: “The Soup that Blue up Twitter.” The description explains that Dr. Becket will discuss the shared curiosity of science, open science, and a story from February 2023 when leftover beef soup prepared by her mom turned bright blue. Scientists and people on Twitter collaborated to investigate, leading to a global effort among microbiologists and chemists. At the bottom, there are links to learn more about upcoming webinars at www.informatics.sdsu.edu and Dr. Becket’s website: https://elinneb.wixsite.com/becketlab
marnixmedema.bsky.social
Thanks to @jjjvanderhooft.bsky.social for co-supervision and @wildtypemc.bsky.social @johandelsman.bsky.social @zachreitz.bsky.social #ClaraBelzer @YijunZhu for great contributions & collaborations!
marnixmedema.bsky.social
We think this type of analysis can be used to predict/reveal functions of unknown biosynthetic gene clusters in the future, and understand interactions that mediate microbiome-associated phenotypes.
marnixmedema.bsky.social
... and expression (anti-)correlations of biosynthetic gene clusters highlight positive and negative responses to antibiotic production (related to stress response, siderophores, redox balance).
marnixmedema.bsky.social
Coexpression networks of primary metabolic modules highlight both competition and cross-feeding...
Reposted by Marnix Medema
marnixmedema.bsky.social
Check out the new MITE database! Kudos to @mmzdouc.bsky.social for his leadership in getting this community effort off the ground. Hopefully we can add many more data points with everyone's input!
mmzdouc.bsky.social
Into natural product biosynthesis & tailoring enzymes? Frustrated by the lack of a dedicated resource to explore their functions? Tired of endless literature searches for reaction info? Meet the MITE database, freely available at mite.bioinformatics.nl. Preprint: doi.org/10.26434/che... (1/8)
marnixmedema.bsky.social
We are looking for a 3-year postdoc to work with Daniel Probst, Justin van der Hooft and myself on an exciting project involving federated learning and integrative omics for discovery of new antibiotics from natural products.
Apply here: www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/p...
Please share!
www.wur.nl
marnixmedema.bsky.social
All in all, thanks to the engineering efforts of Arjan Draisma, Catarina Loureiro, Nico Louwen, Satria Kautsar, Jorge Navarro and the rest of the author team, and shout-out to the @jgi.doe.gov and @nigelmouncey.bsky.social for a wonderful collaboration.
marnixmedema.bsky.social
At the same time, for mid-size datasets (most frequent use case), BiG-SCAPE v2 approaches the speed of BiG-SLiCE. For larger datasets, BiG-SCAPE has become more resource-efficient, which now allowed us to analyse >250k BGCs (the antiSMASH database) with it in just a few days on a compute server.
marnixmedema.bsky.social
Benchmarking on several different types of ground truth datasets shows the increases in accuracy, with BiG-SLiCE v2 often matching BiG-SCAPE v1 accuracy, and BiG-SCAPE v2 combining its speed increase with a small but notable accuracy gain as well.
marnixmedema.bsky.social
BiG-SCAPE was completely rewritten from scratch over the past few years, and now features new alignment modes, a more prominent query mode (which allows you to search genomes from a single BGC query) and more scalable interactive visualizations and data selection/filtering.
Reposted by Marnix Medema
mmzdouc.bsky.social
Into natural product biosynthesis & tailoring enzymes? Frustrated by the lack of a dedicated resource to explore their functions? Tired of endless literature searches for reaction info? Meet the MITE database, freely available at mite.bioinformatics.nl. Preprint: doi.org/10.26434/che... (1/8)