Abstract
The Streptomyces genus has been a rich source of bioactive natural products, medicinal chemicals, and novel drug leads for three-quarters of a century. Yet studies suggest that the genus is capable of making some 150,000 more bioactive compounds than all Streptomyces secondary metabolites reported to date. Researchers around the world continue to explore this enormous potential using a range of strategies including modification of culture conditions, bioinformatics and genome mining, heterologous expression, and other approaches to cryptic biosynthetic gene cluster activation. Our survey of the recent literature, with a particular focus on the year 2020, brings together more than 70 novel secondary metabolites from Streptomyces species, which are discussed in this review. This diverse array includes cyclic and linear peptides, peptide derivatives, polyketides, terpenoids, polyaromatics, macrocycles, and furans, the isolation, chemical structures, and bioactivity of which are appraised. The discovery of these many different compounds demonstrates the continued potential of Streptomyces as a source of new and interesting natural products and contributes further important pieces to the mostly unfinished puzzle of Earth’s myriad microbes and their multifaceted chemical output.
Highlights
Analysis of Streptomyces derived natural product discoveries from 1947 to 1997 indicates that, in terms of the number of publications, the discipline peaked in the late 1960s before tapering off through the 1970s and 1980s and significantly decreasing in the 1990s [1]
The preliminary analysis of novel secondary metabolites produced by these Streptomyces strains revealed that the largest proportion (39%) of compounds was isolated from marine-derived Streptomyces, followed by terrestrial soil (27%) (Figure 3)
A review of the natural products isolated from Streptomyces in 2020 reveals a diversity of novel chemical structures and a thriving and multifaceted area of drug discovery research
Summary
Analysis of Streptomyces derived natural product discoveries from 1947 to 1997 indicates that, in terms of the number of publications, the discipline peaked in the late 1960s before tapering off through the 1970s and 1980s and significantly decreasing in the 1990s [1]. The preliminary analysis of novel secondary metabolites produced by these Streptomyces strains revealed that the largest proportion (39%) of compounds was isolated from marine-derived Streptomyces, followed by terrestrial soil (27%) (Figure 3). The size of the peptide core ranged from two to seven amino acids, though three of these compounds, ulleungamide C (1) [11] and viennamycins A and B (2 and 3) (Figure 4) [8], are Molecules 2022, 27, 887 continue to characterise both the Streptomyces genus and natural products more generally, as an important source of drug leads. In vitro studies observed the protective effects of pentaminomycins C (7) and D (8) (Figure 5) against menadione-induced cytotoxicity [9]
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