Chapter 16: Natural Products in the Post-genomic Era

With thousands of fungal and bacterial genomes sequenced in the past two decades, and the prospect of many more to come, bioinformatic analysis has indicated that the biosynthetic capacity of producer strains can reach 30–50 gene clusters that could make isoprenoids, polyketides, nonribosomal peptides, and NRP-PK hybrids, even though only 5–10% may be expressed under a given set of growth conditions. The prospect of 10⁵ to 10⁶ microbial biosynthetic gene clusters to explore for new molecules has spurred methodology for transcriptional activation of specific secondary pathways, development of heterologous host expression systems, rapid and sensitive analytical methods for detection of new product scaffolds, and strategies for pathway re-engineering.