Bio-Chemical Production Processes of Bioactive Natural Products

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, one of the greatest global challenges is development of new anticancer and antimicrobial drugs, especially due to an increasing phenomena of multidrug resistance organisms, newly emerged pathogens and increasing number of cancer related diseases. SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is an example of how important the development of new antimicrobial drugs is.

Natural products are a rich source of new drugs as they constitute more than two-thirds of clinically used antibiotics and 50% of anticancer drugs. However, in most cases genuine natural products cannot be used directly as medicines due to toxic side effects or suboptimal pharmacokinetics. In order to improve the pharmacological properties of these compounds, including bioactivity and stability, or to produce better precursors of semi-synthetic pathways, unnatural derivatives should be made, for example from natural products of fungal or bacterial origin.

Concerning synthetic biology in the natural product bio-production, much has been done using a model organism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, because of its great toolkit in genomic manipulation. However, because of some limitations with S. cerevisiae system for instance with toxicity of the newly engineered and produced metabolites or time-consuming protocols, new approaches are required.

Biotransformation is a process by which organic compounds are transformed from one form to another, aided by organisms such as bacteria or fungi and by their enzymes. Side reactions lead to unwanted products and the treatment of the (desired) product can be complex and involve multi-step procedures such as biomass removal or extraction of the culture fluid. Extraction of biotransformation products is undoubtedly an ambitious task, although scaling-up the production and using the state-of-the-art techniques such as high performance liquid chromatography combined with high resolution mass spectrometry, can enable this task.

This special issue on “Processes of Bio-Chemical Production of Bioactive Natural Products” aims to review novel advances in the development of new methods of bio-chemical production of bioactive natural products and their analogues. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Synthetic biology tools in bio-production of natural products derivatives
• Chemical synthesis and semi-synthesis of natural products
• Modifications by biotransformation
• Alternative methods for bio-chemical production of natural products
• Processes / mechanisms of bio-chemical production

Dr. Dorota Jakubczyk
Guest Editor

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