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Database Profile

MIBiG

General information

URL: https://mibig.secondarymetabolites.org
Full name: Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster
Description: MIBiG is a Genomic Standards Consortium project that builds on the Minimum Information about any Sequence (MIxS) framework.
Year founded: 2015
Last update:
Version: v2.0
Accessibility:
Accessible
Country/Region: Netherlands

Classification & Tag

Data type:
DNA
Data object:
NA
Database category:
Major species:
NA
Keywords:

Contact information

University/Institution: Wageningen University
Address: Bioinformatics Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, NL, The Netherlands
City: Wageningen
Province/State:
Country/Region: Netherlands
Contact name (PI/Team): Marnix H Medema
Contact email (PI/Helpdesk): mibig@secondarymetabolites.org

Publications

39657789
MIBiG 4.0: advancing biosynthetic gene cluster curation through global collaboration. [PMID: 39657789]
Mitja M Zdouc, Kai Blin, Nico L L Louwen, Jorge Navarro, Catarina Loureiro, Chantal D Bader, Constance B Bailey, Lena Barra, Thomas J Booth, Kenan A J Bozhüyük, José D D Cediel-Becerra, Zachary Charlop-Powers, Marc G Chevrette, Yit Heng Chooi, Paul M D'Agostino, Tristan de Rond, Elena Del Pup, Katherine R Duncan, Wenjia Gu, Novriyandi Hanif, Eric J N Helfrich, Matthew Jenner, Yohei Katsuyama, Aleksandra Korenskaia, Daniel Krug, Vincent Libis, George A Lund, Shrikant Mantri, Kalindi D Morgan, Charlotte Owen, Chin-Soon Phan, Benjamin Philmus, Zachary L Reitz, Serina L Robinson, Kumar Saurabh Singh, Robin Teufel, Yaojun Tong, Fidele Tugizimana, Dana Ulanova, Jaclyn M Winter, César Aguilar, Daniel Y Akiyama, Suhad A A Al-Salihi, Mohammad Alanjary, Fabrizio Alberti, Gajender Aleti, Shumukh A Alharthi, Mariela Y Arias Rojo, Amr A Arishi, Hannah E Augustijn, Nicole E Avalon, J Abraham Avelar-Rivas, Kyle K Axt, Hellen B Barbieri, Julio Cesar J Barbosa, Lucas Gabriel Barboza Segato, Susanna E Barrett, Martin Baunach, Christine Beemelmanns, Dardan Beqaj, Tim Berger, Jordan Bernaldo-Agüero, Sandra M Bettenbühl, Vincent A Bielinski, Friederike Biermann, Ricardo M Borges, Rainer Borriss, Milena Breitenbach, Kevin M Bretscher, Michael W Brigham, Larissa Buedenbender, Brodie W Bulcock, Carolina Cano-Prieto, João Capela, Victor J Carrion, Riley S Carter, Raquel Castelo-Branco, Gabriel Castro-Falcón, Fernanda O Chagas, Esteban Charria-Girón, Ayesha Ahmed Chaudhri, Vasvi Chaudhry, Hyukjae Choi, Yukyung Choi, Roya Choupannejad, Jakub Chromy, Melinda S Chue Donahey, Jérôme Collemare, Jack A Connolly, Kaitlin E Creamer, Max Crüsemann, Andres Arredondo Cruz, Andres Cumsille, Jean-Felix Dallery, Luis Caleb Damas-Ramos, Tito Damiani, Martinus de Kruijff, Belén Delgado Martín, Gerardo Della Sala, Jelle Dillen, Drew T Doering, Shravan R Dommaraju, Suhan Durusu, Susan Egbert, Mark Ellerhorst, Baptiste Faussurier, Artem Fetter, Marc Feuermann, David P Fewer, Jonathan Foldi, Andri Frediansyah, Erin A Garza, Athina Gavriilidou, Andrea Gentile, Jennifer Gerke, Hans Gerstmans, Juan Pablo Gomez-Escribano, Luz A González-Salazar, Natalie E Grayson, Claudio Greco, Juan E Gris Gomez, Sebastian Guerra, Shaday Guerrero Flores, Alexey Gurevich, Karina Gutiérrez-García, Lauren Hart, Kristina Haslinger, Beibei He, Teo Hebra, Jethro L Hemmann, Hindra Hindra, Lars Höing, Darren C Holland, Jonathan E Holme, Therese Horch, Pavlo Hrab, Jie Hu, Thanh-Hau Huynh, Ji-Yeon Hwang, Riccardo Iacovelli, Dumitrita Iftime, Marianna Iorio, Sidharth Jayachandran, Eunah Jeong, Jiayi Jing, Jung J Jung, Yuya Kakumu, Edward Kalkreuter, Kyo Bin Kang, Sangwook Kang, Wonyong Kim, Geum Jin Kim, Hyunwoo Kim, Hyun Uk Kim, Martin Klapper, Robert A Koetsier, Cassandra Kollten, Ákos T Kovács, Yelyzaveta Kriukova, Noel Kubach, Aditya M Kunjapur, Aleksandra K Kushnareva, Andreja Kust, Jessica Lamber, Martin Larralde, Niels J Larsen, Adrien P Launay, Ngoc-Thao-Hien Le, Sarah Lebeer, Byung Tae Lee, Kyungha Lee, Katherine L Lev, Shu-Ming Li, Yong-Xin Li, Cuauhtémoc Licona-Cassani, Annette Lien, Jing Liu, Julius Adam V Lopez, Nataliia V Machushynets, Marla I Macias, Taifo Mahmud, Matiss Maleckis, Añadir Maharai Martinez-Martinez, Yvonne Mast, Marina F Maximo, Christina M McBride, Rose M McLellan, Khyati Mehta Bhatt, Chrats Melkonian, Aske Merrild, Mikko Metsä-Ketelä, Douglas A Mitchell, Alison V Müller, Giang-Son Nguyen, Hera T Nguyen, Timo H J Niedermeyer, Julia H O'Hare, Adam Ossowicki, Bohdan O Ostash, Hiroshi Otani, Leo Padva, Sunaina Paliyal, Xinya Pan, Mohit Panghal, Dana S Parade, Jiyoon Park, Jonathan Parra, Marcos Pedraza Rubio, Huong T Pham, Sacha J Pidot, Jörn Piel, Bita Pourmohsenin, Malik Rakhmanov, Sangeetha Ramesh, Michelle H Rasmussen, Adriana Rego, Raphael Reher, Andrew J Rice, Augustin Rigolet, Adriana Romero-Otero, Luis Rodrigo Rosas-Becerra, Pablo Y Rosiles, Adriano Rutz, Byeol Ryu, Libby-Ann Sahadeo, Murrel Saldanha, Luca Salvi, Eduardo Sánchez-Carvajal, Christian Santos-Medellin, Nicolau Sbaraini, Sydney M Schoellhorn, Clemens Schumm, Ludek Sehnal, Nelly Selem, Anjali D Shah, Tania K Shishido, Simon Sieber, Velina Silviani, Garima Singh, Hemant Singh, Nika Sokolova, Eva C Sonnenschein, Margherita Sosio, Sven T Sowa, Karin Steffen, Evi Stegmann, Alena B Streiff, Alena Strüder, Frank Surup, Tiziana Svenningsen, Douglas Sweeney, Judit Szenei, Azat Tagirdzhanov, Bin Tan, Matthew J Tarnowski, Barbara R Terlouw, Thomas Rey, Nicola U Thome, Laura Rosina Torres Ortega, Thomas Tørring, Marla Trindade, Andrew W Truman, Marie Tvilum, Daniel W Udwary, Christoph Ulbricht, Lisa Vader, Gilles P van Wezel, Max Walmsley, Randika Warnasinghe, Heiner G Weddeling, Angus N M Weir, Katherine Williams, Sam E Williams, Thomas E Witte, Steffaney M Wood Rocca, Keith Yamada, Dong Yang, Dongsoo Yang, Jingwei Yu, Zhenyi Zhou, Nadine Ziemert, Lukas Zimmer, Alina Zimmermann, Christian Zimmermann, Justin J J van der Hooft, Roger G Linington, Tilmann Weber, Marnix H Medema

Specialized or secondary metabolites are small molecules of biological origin, often showing potent biological activities with applications in agriculture, engineering and medicine. Usually, the biosynthesis of these natural products is governed by sets of co-regulated and physically clustered genes known as biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). To share information about BGCs in a standardized and machine-readable way, the Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster (MIBiG) data standard and repository was initiated in 2015. Since its conception, MIBiG has been regularly updated to expand data coverage and remain up to date with innovations in natural product research. Here, we describe MIBiG version 4.0, an extensive update to the data repository and the underlying data standard. In a massive community annotation effort, 267 contributors performed 8304 edits, creating 557 new entries and modifying 590 existing entries, resulting in a new total of 3059 curated entries in MIBiG. Particular attention was paid to ensuring high data quality, with automated data validation using a newly developed custom submission portal prototype, paired with a novel peer-reviewing model. MIBiG 4.0 also takes steps towards a rolling release model and a broader involvement of the scientific community. MIBiG 4.0 is accessible online at https://mibig.secondarymetabolites.org/.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2025:53(D1) | 64 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-06)
36399496
MIBiG 3.0: a community-driven effort to annotate experimentally validated biosynthetic gene clusters. [PMID: 36399496]
Barbara R Terlouw, Kai Blin, Jorge C Navarro-Muñoz, Nicole E Avalon, Marc G Chevrette, Susan Egbert, Sanghoon Lee, David Meijer, Michael J J Recchia, Zachary L Reitz, Jeffrey A van Santen, Nelly Selem-Mojica, Thomas Tørring, Liana Zaroubi, Mohammad Alanjary, Gajender Aleti, César Aguilar, Suhad A A Al-Salihi, Hannah E Augustijn, J Abraham Avelar-Rivas, Luis A Avitia-Domínguez, Francisco Barona-Gómez, Jordan Bernaldo-Agüero, Vincent A Bielinski, Friederike Biermann, Thomas J Booth, Victor J Carrion Bravo, Raquel Castelo-Branco, Fernanda O Chagas, Pablo Cruz-Morales, Chao Du, Katherine R Duncan, Athina Gavriilidou, Damien Gayrard, Karina Gutiérrez-García, Kristina Haslinger, Eric J N Helfrich, Justin J J van der Hooft, Afif P Jati, Edward Kalkreuter, Nikolaos Kalyvas, Kyo Bin Kang, Satria Kautsar, Wonyong Kim, Aditya M Kunjapur, Yong-Xin Li, Geng-Min Lin, Catarina Loureiro, Joris J R Louwen, Nico L L Louwen, George Lund, Jonathan Parra, Benjamin Philmus, Bita Pourmohsenin, Lotte J U Pronk, Adriana Rego, Devasahayam Arokia Balaya Rex, Serina Robinson, L Rodrigo Rosas-Becerra, Eve T Roxborough, Michelle A Schorn, Darren J Scobie, Kumar Saurabh Singh, Nika Sokolova, Xiaoyu Tang, Daniel Udwary, Aruna Vigneshwari, Kristiina Vind, Sophie P J M Vromans, Valentin Waschulin, Sam E Williams, Jaclyn M Winter, Thomas E Witte, Huali Xie, Dong Yang, Jingwei Yu, Mitja Zdouc, Zheng Zhong, Jérôme Collemare, Roger G Linington, Tilmann Weber, Marnix H Medema

With an ever-increasing amount of (meta)genomic data being deposited in sequence databases, (meta)genome mining for natural product biosynthetic pathways occupies a critical role in the discovery of novel pharmaceutical drugs, crop protection agents and biomaterials. The genes that encode these pathways are often organised into biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). In 2015, we defined the Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster (MIBiG): a standardised data format that describes the minimally required information to uniquely characterise a BGC. We simultaneously constructed an accompanying online database of BGCs, which has since been widely used by the community as a reference dataset for BGCs and was expanded to 2021 entries in 2019 (MIBiG 2.0). Here, we describe MIBiG 3.0, a database update comprising large-scale validation and re-annotation of existing entries and 661 new entries. Particular attention was paid to the annotation of compound structures and biological activities, as well as protein domain selectivities. Together, these new features keep the database up-to-date, and will provide new opportunities for the scientific community to use its freely available data, e.g. for the training of new machine learning models to predict sequence-structure-function relationships for diverse natural products. MIBiG 3.0 is accessible online at https://mibig.secondarymetabolites.org/.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2023:51(D1) | 266 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-06)
31612915
MIBiG 2.0: a repository for biosynthetic gene clusters of known function. [PMID: 31612915]
Kautsar SA, Blin K, Shaw S, Navarro-Muñoz JC, Terlouw BR, van der Hooft JJJ, van Santen JA, Tracanna V, Suarez Duran HG, Pascal Andreu V, Selem-Mojica N, Alanjary M, Robinson SL, Lund G, Epstein SC, Sisto AC, Charkoudian LK, Collemare J, Linington RG, Weber T, Medema MH.

Fueled by the explosion of (meta)genomic data, genome mining of specialized metabolites has become a major technology for drug discovery and studying microbiome ecology. In these efforts, computational tools like antiSMASH have played a central role through the analysis of Biosynthetic Gene Clusters (BGCs). Thousands of candidate BGCs from microbial genomes have been identified and stored in public databases. Interpreting the function and novelty of these predicted BGCs requires comparison with a well-documented set of BGCs of known function. The MIBiG (Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene Cluster) Data Standard and Repository was established in 2015 to enable curation and storage of known BGCs. Here, we present MIBiG 2.0, which encompasses major updates to the schema, the data, and the online repository itself. Over the past five years, 851 new BGCs have been added. Additionally, we performed extensive manual data curation of all entries to improve the annotation quality of our repository. We also redesigned the data schema to ensure the compliance of future annotations. Finally, we improved the user experience by adding new features such as query searches and a statistics page, and enabled direct link-outs to chemical structure databases. The repository is accessible online at https://mibig.secondarymetabolites.org/.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2020:48(D1) | 439 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-06)
26284661
Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster. [PMID: 26284661]
Medema MH, Kottmann R, Yilmaz P, Cummings M, Biggins JB, Blin K, de Bruijn I, Chooi YH, Claesen J, Coates RC, Cruz-Morales P, Duddela S, Düsterhus S, Edwards DJ, Fewer DP, Garg N, Geiger C, Gomez-Escribano JP, Greule A, Hadjithomas M, Haines AS, Helfrich EJ, Hillwig ML, Ishida K, Jones AC, Jones CS, Jungmann K, Kegler C, Kim HU, Kötter P, Krug D, Masschelein J, Melnik AV, Mantovani SM, Monroe EA, Moore M, Moss N, Nützmann HW, Pan G, Pati A, Petras D, Reen FJ, Rosconi F, Rui Z, Tian Z, Tobias NJ, Tsunematsu Y, Wiemann P, Wyckoff E, Yan X, Yim G, Yu F, Xie Y, Aigle B, Apel AK, Balibar CJ, Balskus EP, Barona-Gómez F, Bechthold A, Bode HB, Borriss R, Brady SF, Brakhage AA, Caffrey P, Cheng YQ, Clardy J, Cox RJ, De Mot R, Donadio S, Donia MS, van der Donk WA, Dorrestein PC, Doyle S, Driessen AJ, Ehling-Schulz M, Entian KD, Fischbach MA, Gerwick L, Gerwick WH, Gross H, Gust B, Hertweck C, Höfte M, Jensen SE, Ju J, Katz L, Kaysser L, Klassen JL, Keller NP, Kormanec J, Kuipers OP, Kuzuyama T, Kyrpides NC, Kwon HJ, Lautru S, Lavigne R, Lee CY, Linquan B, Liu X, Liu W, Luzhetskyy A, Mahmud T, Mast Y, Méndez C, Metsä-Ketelä M, Micklefield J, Mitchell DA, Moore BS, Moreira LM, Müller R, Neilan BA, Nett M, Nielsen J, O'Gara F, Oikawa H, Osbourn A, Osburne MS, Ostash B, Payne SM, Pernodet JL, Petricek M, Piel J, Ploux O, Raaijmakers JM, Salas JA, Schmitt EK, Scott B, Seipke RF, Shen B, Sherman DH, Sivonen K, Smanski MJ, Sosio M, Stegmann E, Süssmuth RD, Tahlan K, Thomas CM, Tang Y, Truman AW, Viaud M, Walton JD, Walsh CT, Weber T, van Wezel GP, Wilkinson B, Willey JM, Wohlleben W, Wright GD, Ziemert N, Zhang C, Zotchev SB, Breitling R, Takano E, Glöckner FO.
Nat Chem Biol. 2015:11(9) | 599 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-06)

Ranking

All databases:
131/6895 (98.115%)
Gene genome and annotation:
51/2021 (97.526%)
Standard ontology and nomenclature:
14/238 (94.538%)
131
Total Rank
1,277
Citations
127.7
z-index

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Not Rated
Data quality & quantity:
Content organization & presentation
System accessibility & reliability:

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Record metadata

Created on: 2020-11-08
Curated by:
zheng luo [2025-07-01]
Yue Qi [2023-08-23]
Lin Liu [2021-03-24]
Qiang Du [2020-11-25]
Qiang Du [2020-11-23]
Chang Liu [2020-11-08]