My research centers on microbial natural products and the biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) that encode them. These small bioactive molecules are essential in medicine, agriculture, and materials science, and recent advances in genomics now support systematic discovery of their underlying pathways.
Since 2010, I have coordinated and co‑developed antiSMASH, the field‑standard platform for microbial genome mining. Under my leadership, the antiSMASH ecosystem has expanded to include the MIBiG data standard and database of experimentally characterized BGCs, the antiSMASH database, and complementary tools such as a CRISPR/Cas sgRNA design system.
My current work increasingly incorporates machine‑learning approaches for structure and activity prediction of natural products, integrating genomic, chemical, and bioactivity data to accelerate discovery across diverse microbial lineages.