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Mitja M. Zdouc

@mmzdouc.bsky.social
414 followers 368 following 103 posts

Tenure Track Professor in Natural Product Research. Has a passion for biosynthesis, linked open data, and software engineering. Former postdoc@WUR, former PhD@Naicons Srl

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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Great to see the antiSMASH family grow!
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
In addition to *three* novel modes of action in *three* years 🚀
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Ah, I see, good point! I will create a feature request to the Ketcher team, perhaps this is something they want to add, too!
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
I always recommend Ketcher: free and online :) lifescience.opensource.epam.com/KetcherDemoS...
lifescience.opensource.epam.com
Ketcher v3.12.0
Ketcher is a web-based chemical structure editor
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
This work was led by Fatima El Arnouki Belhaji under the project supervision of Joleen Masschelein. It was great fun to work on it and make a small contribution to this amazing study!
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
This work expands combinatorial biosynthetic capacities for PUFA synthase-like systems and taps new chemical space. Curious about their biosynthesis? The ChtnH tailoring enzyme is already in the MITE DB: mite.lisc.univie.ac.at/repository/M...
mite.lisc.univie.ac.at
Minimum Information about a Tailoring Enzyme Repository
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Comparative analysis revealed extensive diversification of such triple hybrid pathways, and we were also able to identify these compounds in metabolomics data. The chitinimines show some antibacterial activity, perhaps due to their surfactant-like properties.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
The chitinimines are produced by Chitinimonas koreensis featuring a C22 polyunsaturated lipid conjugated to a cyclic peptide-polyketide and a pyruvate-derived cyclic acetal moiety. We added a new rule to antiSMASH to target BGCs with PUFA synthase-like, PKS-, and NRPS-encoding genes.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Interested in natural products? We just published an article on hybrid peptide-polyketide-specialized lipids and describe the chitinimines, a new family of amphiphilic metabolites. Read it open access in JACS Au: doi.org/10.1021/jacs...
doi.org
Charting the Biosynthetic Landscape of Hybrid Polyketide-Nonribosomal Peptide-Specialized Lipids
Polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) synthase enzymes are best known for their role in membrane lipid biosynthesis in marine psychrophilic bacteria but have also evolved to assemble specialized lipid-con...
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
What can you do with the information in MITE? Besides its use as a knowledgebase (no more hour-long browsing through papers!), MITE entries can be used for machine learning, for annotation purposes, or as a parts catalog for synthetic biology.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
The 400th entry is for MonD (bioregistry.io/mite:MITE000...), a cytochrome P450 monooxydase in the monensin BGC (bioregistry.io/mibig:BGC000...). It hydroxylizes the C-26 of dehydroxydemethylmonensin, leading to the intermediate demethylmonensin.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Interested in tailoring enzymes? Meet MITE - the Minimum Information about a Tailoring Enzyme Database (mite.lisc.univie.ac.at), capturing the substrate- and reaction-specificity of enzymes in natural product biosynthesis. MITE has just passed a milestone: the 400th MITE entry has been added!
mite.lisc.univie.ac.at
Minimum Information about a Tailoring Enzyme Repository
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Reposted by Mitja M. Zdouc
Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Are you correlating natural product #metabolomics and bioactivity data? Annoyed by the lack of tools that also integrate #antiSMASH results? Meet #FERMO, our metabolomics data analysis webtool (fermo.bioinformatics.nl), now finally published in ACS Meas Sci Au doi.org/10.1021/acsm...
doi.org
FERMO: A Dashboard for Biochemometric Prioritization of Molecular Features from Mass Spectral Data
Many natural products can selectively modulate biological processes, making them prime candidates for drug discovery. However, the complexity of biological samples makes clear attribution of activity ...
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Part of the work has also been done at University of Vienna, making it the first publication of the ZdoucLab.org
zdouclab.org
Zdouc Lab
Microbial Natural Products Meet Data Science. The Zdouc research lab at the University of Vienna investigates naturally occurring, specialized molecules called natural products. These small molecules ...
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
This work would have not been possible without the efforts of many people, including Hannah Augustijn and Nataliia Machushynets, and my former PIs @jjjvanderhooft.bsky.social and @marnixmedema.bsky.social during my time at Wageningen University.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
FERMO is freely available online on fermo.bioinformatics.nl, has no login requirements, and keeps jobs available for 30 days. FERMO can also be run offline via a convenient Docker image available on GitHub (github.com/fermo-metabolomics/fermo). Feel free to test it - documentation is available!
fermo.bioinformatics.nl
FERMO
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
In another study, we show how FERMO prioritizes the antibiotic actinomycin D in an OSMAC study. Notably, FERMO prioritized only 0.7% of the features (8 out of 1,136) to be bioactivity-responsible, and also linked them to the actinomycin BGC identified via the integrated antiSMASH job.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
For instance, we show how FERMO was able to reproduce the results of the Bioactivity-Based Molecular Networking study, while overall selecting a lower fraction of features. FERMO can employ several correlation algorithms and allows for a range of different false discovery rate adjustment methods.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
FERMO calculates a number of scores, including bioactivity and novelty scores, and allows to filter features with a combination of up to 15 different filter settings using a convenient dashboard GUI. This allows FERMO to accommodate different research questions.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
FERMO was born out of a simple need: integrating LC-MS metabolomics, bioactivity, and other data should be easy and allow for fast prioritization of features (and samples!) of interest. FERMO does just that and more!
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Are you correlating natural product #metabolomics and bioactivity data? Annoyed by the lack of tools that also integrate #antiSMASH results? Meet #FERMO, our metabolomics data analysis webtool (fermo.bioinformatics.nl), now finally published in ACS Meas Sci Au doi.org/10.1021/acsm...
doi.org
FERMO: A Dashboard for Biochemometric Prioritization of Molecular Features from Mass Spectral Data
Many natural products can selectively modulate biological processes, making them prime candidates for drug discovery. However, the complexity of biological samples makes clear attribution of activity ...
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
If you are interested in our work, feel free to check out our website or reach out to us! We are always interested in collaborations, so feel free to reach out to me (ideally via my institutional email mitja.zdouc@univie.ac.at since I rarely read my social media messages)
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Finally, we also want to experimentally validate our own predictions, and this data will feed into the other two efforts in a virtuous circle.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
This work will also include our existing efforts of combining metabolomics, bioactivity, and genomics data with the FERMO tool (fermo.bioinformatics.nl), now finally published in ACS Measurement Science Au (doi.org/10.1021/acsm....
doi.org
FERMO: A Dashboard for Biochemometric Prioritization of Molecular Features from Mass Spectral Data
Many natural products can selectively modulate biological processes, making them prime candidates for drug discovery. However, the complexity of biological samples makes clear attribution of activity to molecules challenging, thereby hampering hypothesis-driven prioritization, with liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry routinely detecting hundreds of molecules per sample. Existing biochemometric tools typically focus on facilitating data-driven exploration to support manual interpretation, rather than more objective, data-driven prioritization and hypothesis generation. Here, we introduce FERMO, a free online dashboard interface for biochemometrics-based prioritization of molecular features and samples. FERMO accepts qualitative and quantitative bioactivity assay data and further integrates group metadata and results from genome mining. FERMO performs automated data processing, organization, and annotation, supporting prioritization with the calculation of custom scores. FERMO supports both exploratory and targeted analysis through efficient interactive visualization, reproducible prioritization, and data filtering. We demonstrate FERMO’s utility in benchmarking studies prioritizing bioactive natural products from complex biological matrices. FERMO is freely available at https://fermo.bioinformatics.nl/.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
We will also work on development of data mining and prioritization algorithms, including AI tools. Lots of raw data is available but not integrated appropriately, and we want to develop tools that directly serve bench scientists.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
We will continue and expand our existing biocuration efforts, such as the MITE (mite.lisc.univie.ac.at, now hosted at the University of Vienna) and MIBiG databases, and steer them towards linked open data.
mite.lisc.univie.ac.at
Minimum Information about a Tailoring Enzyme Repository
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
One aspect will be innovating integrative knowledge representation. While more and more papers are being published, this data is not machine-readable, preventing its use by computational tools.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Antimicrobial resistance is an urgent threat, with millions of casualties each year. Our work in the ZdoucLab.org will combine experimental and computational work to accelerate the discovery of novel antimicrobials. We will follow three approaches.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
After a short hiatus from social media, I am back with some exciting news: I have recently been appointed assistant professor for Natural Product Research at the University of Vienna and have started my own research group: ZdoucLab.org!
zdouclab.org
Zdouc Lab
Microbial Natural Products Meet Data Science. The Zdouc research lab at the University of Vienna investigates naturally occurring, specialized molecules called natural products. These small molecules ...
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
@skepteis.bsky.social 🥲
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Chiming in here: if you are using a library (e.g. Python's requests) to access Zenodo programmatically and get 429 errors, make sure to define a custom User-Agent header that identifies your client (e.g. <my tool>/<tool version> (<link to tool website>) to help distinguish from abusive traffic!
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
Great to see it finally published! I've tried it during beta testing and it works great! Users of v1 will feel at home right away!
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Reposted by Mitja M. Zdouc
Marnix Medema @marnixmedema.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
Now out in @natcomms.nature.com : versions 2.0 of both BiG-SCAPE and BiG-SLiCE! With significant speed and accuracy increases, as well as new interactive functionalities. Read the full paper here #openaccess: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Reposted by Mitja M. Zdouc
nicoleeavalon.bsky.social @nicoleeavalon.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
The MIBiG 5.0 Annotathon is coming soon, and registration is now open! 🧬 Does your research involve biosynthetic gene clusters? Do you love natural product biosynthesis? Do you have an interest in rare & exotic enzymes? We can use your help & expertise. Register here 👉 forms.gle/C1cWcLHtrjT2...
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Make sure to join us in the MIBiG Annotathons! The MITE database (mite.bioinformatics.nl) will join the efforts! If you are interested in tailoring enzymes/maturases, make sure to join us!
mite.bioinformatics.nl
Minimum Information about a Tailoring Enzyme Repository
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
I was always wondering about the cost difference between classes of NPs (in microbes). NRPS/PKS are costly to set up but can crank out molecules quite efficiently. RiPPs piggyback-ride on existing infrastructure but the per-unit-cost is probably higher. Is there any existing literature on that
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Reposted by Mitja M. Zdouc
Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
Marine #sponges are generally considered biosynthetic "hotspots" (e.g. Theonella) - but does this always hold true? In our newest study led by @stephenjackson.bsky.social we are looking at Inflatella pellicula's biosynthetic capacity - and our results are surprising doi.org/10.1099/mgen...
doi.org
New insights into the microbiome of the deep-sea sponge Inflatella pellicula and the secondary metabolic potential of metagenome-assembled genomes and the wider microbiome
Marine sponges are found in all of the world’s oceans, from the surface waters to the deepest abyssal zones. The marine sponge holobiont is a rich source of microbial and chemical diversity. Up to 63 ...
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
I am happy to have played a minor role in this study, which was funded by the @ec.europa.eu #Horizon2020 project #MARBLES (Grant Agreement no. 101000392).
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
However, the BGCs that were found appeared to be very dissimilar to characterized clusters and from BGCs found in other sponge microbiomes. This indicates that Inflatella pellicula has uniquely adapted to its "abyssal" lifestyle, and may yield novel natural products usable in medicine.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
Sampled from 2,900 m depth, most of the microbiome of Inflatella pellicula could not be taxonomically classified (indicating that it is mostly unknown), and only a handful of biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) were detected - in stark contrast to the biosynthetic diversity harbored by other sponges.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
Marine #sponges are generally considered biosynthetic "hotspots" (e.g. Theonella) - but does this always hold true? In our newest study led by @stephenjackson.bsky.social we are looking at Inflatella pellicula's biosynthetic capacity - and our results are surprising doi.org/10.1099/mgen...
doi.org
New insights into the microbiome of the deep-sea sponge Inflatella pellicula and the secondary metabolic potential of metagenome-assembled genomes and the wider microbiome
Marine sponges are found in all of the world’s oceans, from the surface waters to the deepest abyssal zones. The marine sponge holobiont is a rich source of microbial and chemical diversity. Up to 63 ...
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
If you happen to work with heterocycles and run into weird errors, make sure to check for the notations of your heteroatoms!
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
Turns out that the aromatic nitrogen in tryptophan can be written in two ways: Ketcher expresses it as ":[#7;h1]:", but you can also write it as ":[n&H1]:". The former is rejected by RDKit, while the latter is accepted. Only took me a few hours to figure that out :,)
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
Somehow, I could not make the reaction pass the validation check ("does the reaction SMARTS convert a substrate SMILES into the expected product SMILES"), with RDKit complaining that the resulting SMILES was not valid.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
I am working on the nosiheptide pathway and one of the reactions it the installation of 3-methyl-2-indolic acid on the nascent precursor via the NosIJK complex. Because the substrate is quite large, I am drawing the reaction in Ketcher, exporting it as a reaction SMARTS, and validating it in RDKit.
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
I am working with reaction SMARTS again and they can be really tricky in representing heterocycles! I just had a "fun" time debugging a reaction involving tryptophan - I will show you what I mean!
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 28/12/2025
Cool stuff! I'm glad we don't have any mountain lions in Europe
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
Awesome work with implications for chemical ecology!
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
I am happy that the @w-u-r.bsky.social delegation @mmzdouc.bsky.social @marnixmedema.bsky.social @jorgenavarro-22.bsky.social could contribute to this publication and congratulations again to @garimasingh-gs.bsky.social who worked tirelessly to bring this paper over the finish line! (5/5)
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Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
Finally, we found that ~98% of the BGCs in LFF are putatively novel (uncharacterized to date) and that lichen metabolic profiles contain a plethora of unidentified metabolites! (4/5)
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