Microbial Natural Products in the Era of Genome- and Metabolome-Mining (2nd Edition)

Dear Colleagues,

Microbial natural products have a strong history as valuable lead structures for drug discovery in areas ranging from infectious diseases and cancer therapy to agriculture. Thus, great efforts are constantly being made to find novel natural products —also referred to as secondary metabolites or specialized metabolites —from diverse microorganisms. While activity-guided approaches have yielded most of the bioactive secondary metabolites known to date, many of these “low-hanging fruits” have now been harvested. Furthermore, the number of molecule families characterized so far is significantly lower than expected from the analysis of genome sequence information for many microbes. Therefore, contemporary natural products discovery is increasingly driven by genomics- and metabolomics-based strategies in order to provide novel candidate molecules for the development of new drugs. This Special Issue highlights recent studies where genome- and metabolome-mining approaches were instrumental in uncovering and characterizing new natural products. Contributions should include a description of how genome information or metabolomics methods were helpful, e.g., as part of the analytical setup for compound discovery, to support structure elucidation, for connecting molecules to biosynthetic genes, to establish a model for biosynthesis, to shed light on specific enzymatic steps during compound formation, for production improvement, or to gain insights into bioactivity, host self-resistance, and the mode-of-action of the investigated molecules.

Dr. Daniel Krug
Dr. Joachim J. Hug
Guest Editors

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