Genome Mining Approaches to Bacterial Natural Product Discovery

Abstract

The biosynthesis of bacterial natural products, coveted for their use in medicine and agriculture due to their biological activities, is encoded by chromosomally adjacent groups of genes called biosynthetic gene clusters. In the last two decades, genome mining has emerged as a powerful method for natural product discovery based on the identification, analysis and expression of such biosynthetic gene clusters. Here, we provide an overview of the field of bacterial natural product genome mining, and discuss its future prospects.