Metabolites isolated from living systems (natural products) continue to yield new drugs despite deprioritization of natural products research by the private sector starting in the early 1990s. The main advantage of natural products as a source of drugs – they have evolved to interact with biological systems and, thus, hit rates are higher than with synthetic molecules – makes it worthwhile to overcome their intrinsic challenges. During the discovery stage, the rediscovery of known compounds is the main challenge. Once a natural product hit has been identified, supply issues and difficulties with structure diversification may hinder development. A continued understanding of natural product biosynthesis coupled with genomic and synthetic biology approaches can contribute to overcoming these challenges. In this presentation, I will provide examples of genome mining to identify biosynthetic genes (1, 2), and will discuss how that knowledge can be used to increase supply (unpublished), and to contribute to structure diversification (3). Finally, I will discuss our efforts toward developing synthetic biology tools to facilitate natural product discovery (4) from underexplored sources (5).

Harnessing bacterial genomes for natural product discovery and development

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.