Dr Kate Duncan

  • Senior Lecturer in Microbial Metabolomics and Antibiotic Discovery (University of Newcastle)
  • Location: Room 250, Gilbert Scott Building

Title: Marine microbial biodiscovery - using biological questions to uncover patterns in microbial ‘omics data.

Bio: 

Microbial drug discovery in the 'omics era relies on three key datasets, biosynthetic, chemical and biological (activity). Yet, to integrate and interrogate these large and complex datasets remains a challenge and results in the low-throughput prioritization of only a few strains based on observed antibiotic activity. Despite this wealth of genomic and metabolomic data, linking metabolites to the BGC responsible for their production and to observed bioactivity is limited, slow (manual) and challenging. Furthermore, our current discovery is reliant on existing biosynthetic, chemical and antibiotic knowledge, thus overlooking unidentified parent ions (metabolites) or hypothetical proteins (BGCs) which is the exact chemical and biosynthetic space which should be prioritized to identify novel antibiotics. Here, approaches to combine data sets consisting of bacterial genomes (and their predicted BGCs), the chemical products of these same strains and their bioactivity profiles will be discussed. Several datasets of Actinomycetota genomes have been mined for BGCs and these strains cultured to generate metabolite extracts for comparative metabolomics (high resolution tandem mass spectrometry / molecular networking) and antibiotic screening (against a panel of clinically relevant pathogens). Driven by biological questions, tools have been developed to establish patterns across strains and learn relationships between BGC, spectral features and bioactivity – here we will discuss experimental data considerations and how ‘omics information is informing biodiscovery.

First published: 13 August 2025

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