2016 SIMB Annual Meeting and Exhibition

In spite of the success of natural products as a chemical resource for drug leads, during the last two decades the drug discovery industry has tended to deemphasize natural products drug discovery. This is partly due to the fact that industrial discovery of bioactive fungal metabolites is a complex, expensive, integrated but somewhat empirical process. Advances in fungal genomics have demonstrated that natural products biosynthetic pathways are vastly more diverse and experimentally tractable than previously imagined. This session will focus on elucidation of the molecular mechanisms of fungal natural products biosynthesis and how such knowledge will speed up rational access of the vast fungal natural products repertoire uncovered by genomics for drug discovery.