WU has a global reputation for its ground-breaking research and innovative education in the fields of food and health, sustainable agrosystems, the rural environment, and societal development - all of which make an essential contribution to the quality of life, i.e. the supply of safe and healthy food and drinks, on the one hand, and the chance to live, work and play in a balanced ecosystem with a large variety of plants and animals. WU participates in MARBLES through the Plant Sciences Group (PSG) and the Agrotechnology and Food Sciences Group (AFSG). PSG brings together science education and scientific, strategic and applied research in the fields of biology, of plants in relation to their environment, of plant-related organisms and of plant production. This project will be carried out at the Bioinformatics Group within PSG. This rapidly expanding research group focuses on fundamental and applied bioinformatics research in the life sciences. In particular, they develop and apply novel computational methods for the analysis and integration of –omics data. The group has a strong track record in genome analysis, algorithm development and tool construction.

In WP1, WU will be involved in mapping microbial taxonomic and biosynthetic biodiversity from marine habitats using metagenomic analysis and performing targeted isolation of high-potential microbes. In WP3, WU will analyse metatranscriptomic data to link specific BGCs to key biological activities and microbiome associated phenotypes and unravel the regulatory networks governing their expression. In WP4, WU will develop and apply new tools to link BGCs from (meta)genomic data to metabolites observed in MS/MS metabolomic data, based on matching chemical features from sequence-based predictions on BGCs to mass shifts and motifs identified in MS/MS data.