A Systematic Computational Analysis of Biosynthetic Gene Cluster Evolution: Lessons for Engineering Biosynthesis
Figure 3
Unexpected evolutionary relationships within the rapamycin family.
a, Distinct scaffolds produced by pathways from related BGCs. The scatter plot shows the relationship between the sequence homology of a pair of BGCs (x-axis) and the structural homology of their small molecule products (y-axis), compared to rapamycin and its BGC. Each circle represents a gene cluster and its small molecule product. Meridamycin and FK520 are closely related to rapamycin, as are their BGCs. While the pladienolide BGC is closely related to the rapamycin BGC, the structure of pladienolide itself is not very similar to that of rapamycin. In particular, pladienolide has a much smaller macrocycle and lacks shikimate- or pipecolate-derived moieties, and, as a result, binds to a distinct protein target. Structural similarity is estimated by the Tanimoto coefficient using linear-path fingerprints (FP2) from Open Babel [67], while sequence homology is represented as the Jaccard index defined on pairs of Pfam domains that share sequence identities within the top 10th percentile of all-pair sequence identities. The number of domain pairs that share sequence identities within the top 10th percentile and sequence identity of all domain pairs are shown as point sizes and colors, respectively. b, The role of concerted evolution in homogenizing domains within a BGC. Phylogenetic trees of KS and AT domains from the rapamycin, FK520, meridamycin, and pladienolide BGCs are shown (for detailed trees with accession numbers and bootstrap values, see Figure S11). The KS and AT sequences largely cluster into BGC-specific clades; for the AT domains, this is even the case for two different clusters encoding the same compound (meridamycin), showing the ability of concerted evolution to homogenize domains within a BGC. c, Chemical structures of rapamycin, meridamycin, FK520 and pladienolide. The sub-structure shared among rapamycin, meridamycin and FK520 is colored red, and the domains responsible for the biosynthesis of this sub-structure in each molecule are indicated with red circles in b.