Bioinformatics tools for the discovery of new lipopeptides with biocontrol applications

As conventional or chemical pesticides have negative impact on environment and health of both farmer and consumers, it becomes relevant to develop alternative solutions to limit their use. In this context, innovative strategies to accelerate the development of biocontrol agents are welcome. For a decade of years, it has been demonstrated that lipopeptides are very efficient weapons against fungi responsible for crop diseases. Lipopeptides are secondary metabolites, produced by many microorganisms including beneficial rhizobacteria. The lipopeptide biosynthetic pathways include nonribosomal peptide synthetases. These modular enzymatic complexes work as assembly lines to build the peptides step by step, leading to the production of original peptide compounds with specific features as the presence of non proteinogenic monomers and cyclic and branched structures. In this paper, Florine and Norine bioinformatics tools, especially dedicated to non-ribosomal synthetases and their products are presented. Their use is mainly focused on the discovery of lipopeptides produced by Bacillus or Pseudomonas because they seem to represent a versatile reservoir of active secondary metabolites with promising activities for applications in phytosanitary area.