Natural products have been a rich source of compounds for drug discovery. However, their
use has diminished in the past two decades, in part because of technical barriers to …

Bacterial genomes encode the biosynthetic potential to produce hundreds of thousands of
complex molecules with diverse applications, from medicine to agriculture and materials …

Cells navigate environments, communicate and build complex patterns by initiating gene
expression in response to specific signals. Engineers seek to harness this capability to …

Actinobacteria, particularly those of genus Streptomyces, remain invaluable hosts for the
discovery and engineering of natural products and their cognate biosynthetic pathways …

A wide variety of enzymatic pathways that produce specialized metabolites in bacteria, fungi
and plants are known to be encoded in biosynthetic gene clusters. Information about these …

Covering: up to July 2015 Nonribosomal peptides are amongst the most widespread and
structurally diverse secondary metabolites in nature with many possessing bioactivity that …

Highlights•Predictability and robustness are major challenges for synthetic
biology.•Engineering bacteria requires putting synthetic constructs into growing host …

Microbial natural products are a tremendous source of new bioactive chemical entities for
drug discovery. Next generation sequencing has revealed an unprecedented genomic …

Genomic sequence data have revealed the presence of a large fraction of putatively silent
biosynthetic gene clusters in the genomes of actinomycetes that encode for secondary …

Streptomyces has a strong capability for producing a large number of bioactive natural
products and remains invaluable as a source for the discovery of novel drug leads. Although …