Natural products are among the best sources of drugs and drug leads and serve as outstanding small molecule probes for dissecting fundamental biological processes. Natural product biosynthesis continues to push the frontier of modern chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular biology by revealing novel chemical reactions, complex enzyme systems, and intricate regulatory mechanisms. The progress made in the last two decades in connecting natural products to the genes that encode their biosynthesis has fundamentally changed the landscape of natural products research and sparked the emergence of a suite of contemporary approaches to natural products discovery. While Nature’s ability to generate diverse natural products from simple building blocks has inspired combinatorial biosynthesis and made it possible to produce designer natural products and their analogues by rational metabolic pathway engineering, technological advances in DNA sequencing, genome mining, and bioinformatics has also allowed targeted discovery natural product scaffolds by exploring the vast combinatorial biosynthesis repertoire found in Nature. Selected examples from our current studies will be presented to highlight Nature as the ultimate combinatorial biosynthetic chemist, inspiring natural product biosynthesis and engineering.

Nature as the ultimate combinatorial biosynthetic chemist: Inspiration for engineering natural products biosynthesis

255th National Meeting (2018)

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