S164: Targeted discovery of new natural products from underexplored actinomycetes. Departments of Chemistry and Molecular Therapeutics and Natural Products Library Initiative at The Scripps Research Institute, The Scripps Research Institute, Jupiter, FL 3

Natural products remain the best sources of drugs and drug leads, and this remains true today despite the fact that many pharmaceutical companies have deemphasized natural product research in favor of high-throughput screening of combinatorial libraries during the past two decades.  Bacteria of both terrestrial and marine origin have proven to be excellent sources of novel natural products.  Recent advances in microbial genomics (genome sequencing, microbial ecology, and metagenomics) have unequivocally demonstrated that the potential of natural product biosynthesis in bacterial is much higher than previously appreciated.  A great challenge for the natural product community is to develop practical strategies to discover novel natural products efficiently and cost effectively.  Our current efforts in developing methods to survey biosynthetic potentials in microorganisms, thereby identifying the most promising strains and prioritizing them for targeted discovery of novel natural products will be discussed.