Many organisms are capable of producing small molecules with intricate chemical structures and potent biological activities. Many of these natural products (NPs), also known as specialized or secondary metabolites, have found applications in medicine, agriculture, or engineering . The biosynthetic machinery required for the generation of NPs is often physically clustered in the genome of the producing organism, in a so-called biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC). Defined as a group of two or more genes, BGCs often contain the whole set of genes responsible for scaffold biosynthesis, tailoring/maturation reactions, self-resistance and transport/regulation . Therefore, BGCs can be considered the "blueprints" of NPs. Their characterization is an essential part of NP research, as they are the object of "genome mining" strategies that employ sequence data to guide the discovery of novel NP chemistry .