Abstract
Actinobacteria, the bacterial phylum most renowned for natural product discovery, has been established as a valuable source for drug discovery and biotechnology but is underrepresented within accessible genome and strain collections. Herein, we introduce the Natural Products Discovery Center (NPDC), featuring 122,449 strains assembled over eight decades, the genomes of the first 8490 NPDC strains (7142 Actinobacteria), and the online NPDC Portal making both strains and genomes publicly available. A comparative survey of RefSeq and NPDC Actinobacteria highlights the taxonomic and biosynthetic diversity within the NPDC collection, including three new genera, hundreds of new species, and ∼7000 new gene cluster families. Selected examples demonstrate how the NPDC Portal’s strain metadata, genomes, and biosynthetic gene clusters can be leveraged using genome mining approaches. Our findings underscore the ongoing significance of Actinobacteria in natural product discovery, and the NPDC serves as an unparalleled resource for both Actinobacteria strains and genomes.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
The manuscript has been updated to include studies of bonnevillamide A and esperamicin A1.
Data Availability
All data are available in the main text, the supplementary materials, or by request of the corresponding author. DNA sequences from NPDC genomes are available through the NPDC Portal (https://npdc.rc.ufl.edu/home).
