Chemical structure metagenomics of microbial natural products: surveying nonribosomal peptides and beyond
Journal
Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry
Journal Volume
20
Start Page
3050
End Page
3060
ISSN
1860-5397
Date Issued
2024-11-20
Author(s)
Thomas Ma
Abstract
Bioactivity-guided fractionation (BGF) has historically been a fruitful natural product discovery workflow. However, it is plagued by increasing rediscovery rates in recent years and new methods capable of exploring the natural product chemical space more broadly and more efficiently is in urgent need. Chemical structure metagenomics as one such method is the theme of this Perspective. It emphasizes a chemical-structure-centered viewpoint toward natural product research. Key to chemical structure metagenomics is the ability to predict the structure of a natural product based on its biosynthetic gene sequences, which facilitated the discovery of numerous new bioactive molecules and helped uncover oversampled/underexplored niches of decades of BGF based discovery. While microbial nonribosomal peptides have been the focus of chemical structure metagenomics efforts thus far, it is in principle applicable to other natural product families. The future outlook of this new approach will also be discussed.
Subjects
bioinformatics
chemical structure metagenomics
natural product discovery
natural products
nonribosomal peptides
SDGs
Publisher
Beilstein Institut
Type
journal article