Context matters: assessing the impacts of genomic background and ecology on microbial biosynthetic gene cluster evolution

Encoded within many microbial genomes, biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) underlie the synthesis of various secondary metabolites that often mediate ecologically important functions. Several studies and bioinformatics methods developed over the past decade have advanced our understanding of both microbial pangenomes and BGC evolution. In this minireview, we first highlight challenges in broad evolutionary analysis of BGCs, including delineation …