Microbial Genome Mining for Natural Product Drug Discovery

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Bacteria with some discussion on Archaea. The fungi from the domain Eukarya are important sources of natural products (NPs), and interested readers are directed to recent publications relevant to fungal genome mining. The vision and mission for NP discovery remain the same as 50 years ago: The vision is that NPs are important sources for drug discovery and the mission is to discover and develop NPs for human medicine, animal health, and plant crop protection. In spite of the lack of compelling evidence to support the conjecture that unculturable microbes will serve as robust sources of novel NPs for drug discovery, the notion that the unculturable majority has great potential remains pervasive. For microbial genome mining to have a substantial impact on drug discovery, it will be important to continue accumulating complete genome sequences from the most gifted microbes that encode large numbers of new and novel SMGCs encoding drug-like molecules.