Abstract

Infectious diseases are caused by a number of pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria, fungi, viruses, and parasites. These organisms can be spread from one person to another, as well as after exposure to an infected animal that contains pathogenic organisms for humans. According to WHO, in 2016, three of the top ten causes of death worldwide were produced by infectious diseases, such as lower respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases, and tuberculosis. But not all is evil with pathogens, they can be also used for good: They have encoded (sometimes silently) in their genome the ability to produce secondary metabolites. Microorganisms use them as a defense system, competitiveness, and communication, but also these compounds may be of pharmaceutical interest for us in-silico analysis, i.e. the use of current computational software can predict the presence/absence of secondary metabolite genes and/or gene clusters by solely inputting the nucleotidic sequence of the query organism, such as bacteria and fungi. With a correct prediction and the use of heterologous expression systems, these genes can be inserted in model organisms or better-understood organisms, giving us the ability to express cryptic gene clusters from unusual sources to obtain compounds of interest.