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The 160K Natural Organism Library, a unique resource for natural products research

Nature Biotechnology volume 36, pages 570–573 (2018)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

Natural organism libraries (NOLs) are currently experiencing a renaissance. A range of sectors—from the pharmaceutical, chemical, food and nutrition, consumer care or agriculture—continue to turn to NOLs as a source of active pharmaceutical ingredients1,2, colorants or pigments, enzymes, disinfectants, inert or biologically active matrix materials, food and feed additives, agrochemicals or extracts for degrading waste compounds for use in green products. Affordable omics technologies, sophistication in bioinformatics3 and progress in gene expression methodology4 open the possibility of a large-scale, biomolecular-mechanism-oriented approach to study the organism collections and to overcome low yield with secondary metabolites.

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Figure 1: Composition of NOL at BII and its exploitation using four screening approaches.
Figure 2: Geographical distribution of NOL samples.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for A*STAR's basic financial support for the NOL.

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Author notes

  1. Siew Bee Ng and Yoganathan Kanagasundaram: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bioinformatics Institute, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, Republic of Singapore

    Siew Bee Ng, Yoganathan Kanagasundaram, Hao Fan, Prakash Arumugam, Birgit Eisenhaber & Frank Eisenhaber

  2. School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, Republic of Singapore

    Frank Eisenhaber

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  1. Siew Bee Ng
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  2. Yoganathan Kanagasundaram
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Correspondence to Siew Bee Ng or Frank Eisenhaber.

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Ng, S., Kanagasundaram, Y., Fan, H. et al. The 160K Natural Organism Library, a unique resource for natural products research. Nat Biotechnol 36, 570–573 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4187

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