Peptorama: Structure creation and exploratory data analysis for non-ribosomal peptides

Non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs) are a diverse family of compounds with many clinical and biotechnological uses. NRP biodiscovery increasingly focuses on biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs), and NRP structures can generally be predicted from BGCs. Despite their chemical connection, there is no individual research tool which quickly analyses NRPs and BGCs in combination. Here, we present Peptorama, which simplifies drawing diverse NRP structures and allows rapid comparisons between known and predicted NRPs. We show the utility of peptide comparisons and interactive analysis for biodiscovery, exemplified by retrospective analysis of calcium dependent antibiotics and biodiscovery of novel pyoverdine producing candidate strains. Peptide comparisons are computationally more efficient than BGC comparisons, substantially cutting runtimes without loss of biodiscovery functionality. Peptorama can therefore enhance existing pipelines with a rapid method for comparing peptide-level diversity. It is available online at https://peptorama.com/ and is also available to be run locally.