In addition to the core set of “primary metabolites”—chemical compounds shared by most living creatures for energy, growth and reproduction—most organisms produce a set of “secondary metabolites,” chemical compounds that often confer specialized capabilities that allow the organisms to adapt to and control their environment. Many secondary metabolites are produced by groups of genes known as biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs.) 

In the recent Database issue of the journal Nucleic Acids Research, JGI launched the Secondary Metabolism Collaboratory (SMC) as an interactive public database for the research community. With more than 13 million BGCs in the catalog at the time of publication, it is the largest repository of BGC sequence data from over 1.3 million publicly available bacterial and archaeal genome and contig sources. Learn more here on the JGI website.