Merging Ecological and Big Data Approaches to Natural Product Discovery

The relationships between microbes and the secondary metabolites they produce remain poorly understood yet provide important information that can guide natural product discovery efforts. The cultivation of new marine bacterial taxa has helped establish these relationships and supports correlations between taxonomic diversity and structural novelty. Understanding the ecological functions of secondary metabolites can further inform discovery efforts by providing clues as to the environmental signals that trigger expression. When combined with access to genome sequence data and improved methods to assess secondary metabolite production, it is becoming possible to rapidly identify known compounds, link compounds to gene clusters, and prioritize compounds for isolation and characterization. These datasets are also providing unprecedented insight into the complex evolutionary histories of natural product biosynthetic gene clusters and the processes that create structural diversity. Capitalizing on these new approaches is providing increased opportunities for natural product drug discovery.