Natural Products from Synthetic Biology

DNA sequencing has uncovered microbial secondary metabolic potential that never surfaced in fermentation based screens. Deep and cheap sequencing of a genus such as Streptomyces can rapidly expose hundreds of metabolic genes and operons. Meanwhile, synthetic biologists, in their quest to engineer advanced biofuels, are mastering metabolic engineering. Natural products, a reliable source of new therapeutic leads for many years, have fallen into disfavor with drug discoverers partly because these molecules are rarely available as pure compounds and sourcing is often problematic. The convergence of next generation sequencing and synthetic biology, along with less spectacular progress in analytic technologies such as mass spectroscopy, opens the door to the creation of large, reliable libraries of pure natural products for drug discovery.