A new lasso peptide antibiotic exhibits broad-spectrum activity against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria by interfering with bacterial protein synthesis, is unaffected by common resistanc...

Abstract. Specialized or secondary metabolites are small molecules of biological origin, often showing potent biological activities with applications in ag

A secondary metabolite sensitizes competitor Bacillus subtilis to a wide panel of lytic phages by sequestering iron and preventing the activation of Spo0A.

antiSMASH is widely used for biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) detection and annotation, but its standard workflow is poorly suited to large metagenomic assemblies, where massive contig counts create severe runtime bottlenecks and complicate downstream result exploration. We present metaSMASH, a re-engineered fork of antiSMASH for metagenome-scale BGC analysis. metaSMASH preserves the original antiSMASH detection and annotation logic while introducing streaming, memory-bounded execution, record-level parallelisation, optional output filtering, and an interactive dashboard for large result sets. Across 25 benchmark metagenome datasets, metaSMASH reproduced identical BGC detection results while dramatically reducing computational cost. Relative to the default antiSMASH configuration, metaSMASH was a geometric-mean 38x faster. It also outperformed an ad hoc chunked antiSMASH workflow: in the default configuration it achieved a geometric-mean 2.9x speed-up and 1.7x lower peak memory, and with extended-analysis modules enabled it was 2.7x faster and used 3.1x less memory while completing all datasets, whereas the ad hoc workflow ran out of memory on the two largest assemblies. By substantially reducing the computational burden of large-scale metagenome analysis without sacrificing result equivalence, metaSMASH makes routine mining of assembled metagenomes more practical and provides a scalable foundation for natural product discovery from complex microbial communities. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. German Center for Infection Research, TTU Novel Antibiotics 09.716 Volkswagen Foundation, 0072511-00

The genus Streptomyces are valuable producers of antibiotics and other pharmaceutically important bioactive compounds. Advances in molecular engineering tools, such as CRISPR, has provided some access...

Nature Communications - Withanolides are plant steroids with potent bioactivities found in many medicinal plants including Withania somnifera, but their biosynthetic pathway is largely unknown....

The genus Streptomyces are valuable producers of antibiotics and other pharmaceutically important bioactive compounds. Advances in molecular engineering tools, such as CRISPR, has provided some access...

Insect herbivores have driven plants to evolve complex chemical defenses, including mimics of the arthropod molting hormone 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E). Many distantly related plants produce 20E, suggest...

Streptomycetes hold immense potential for discovering novel bioactive molecules for applications in medicine or sustainable agriculture. However, high-throughput exploration is hampered by the current...

Recognizing the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the Nation’s scientific discovery, energy research and national security future, DOE-Office of Science (SC) is commissioning a set of 6 Sc...

The human skin microbiome constitutes a dynamic barrier that can impede pathogen invasion by produci