Mining the Microbiome for Bioactive Products

Microbial natural products possess unique bioactivities and are of significant therapeutic importance. Biosynthetically many of such products are constructed by modular assembly-line like enzymes encoded by clusters of polyketide synthases and nonribosomal peptide synthetase genes. These chemoenzymatic machineries also exhibit a high level of versatility and capacity for combinatorialization. Genome sequencing has further unveiled more of the combinations and permutations created but there is no automated method to mine the endproducts of these biocatalytic machineries. Approaches taken to uncover these known unknown natural products will be discussed.