Biosynthetic potential analysis of an Arctic marine-derived strain Aspergillus sydowii MNP-2

Abstract Genome mining strategy plays a key role in the discovery of bioactive secondary metabolites (SMs) from microorganisms. This work highlighted deciphering the biosynthetic potential of an Arctic marine-derived strain Aspergillus sydowii MNP-2 by a combination of whole genome analysis and antiSMASH as well as feature-based molecular networking (MN) in the Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking (GNPS). A completed genomic assembly of 34.9 Mb containing 10 contigs with an N50 scaffold size of 4.1 Mb was generated and a total of 13,218 protein-coding genes and 46 rRNA, 7 sRNA, 32 snRNA and 119 rRNA were annotated using Nr, GO, COG, Pfam, KEGG and other databases. AntiSMASH results indicated that strain MNP-2 harbors 52 biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs), suggesting a great potential for producing SMs with various structure motifs. Noticeably, these BGC-encoded SMs with therapeutic potential were detected in its metabolic products through GNPS and MN analyses.