Genomes to Natural Products and Back

The search for biologically active natural products has been a long and highly successful pursuit in the discovery of human therapeutics. Increasingly the paradigm of natural product discovery is challenged by the refinding of knowns and the difficulty of selectively finding new entities. Genomics and particularly microbial genomics, has recently provided views of natural product producing organisms inferring many new molecules await discovery. The challenge has now become connecting genomes to natural products and selectively identifying which natural product biosynthetic gene clusters produce new natural products and those encoding known agents. Challenging further is how these genomically revealed prospective molecules can be reconciled with the need for a focus on molecules with relevant biological activity, amoungst the landscape of all the known natural products and synthetic compounds. In this talk, technologies and molecules discovered using a Genomes to Natural Products (GNP) pipeline will be presented.