Carolina Cano-Prieto, Agustina Undabarrena, Ana Calheiros de Carvalho, Jay D Keasling, Pablo Cruz-Morales
Natural products have played significant roles as medicine and food throughout human history. Here, we first provide a brief historical overview of natural products, their classification, biosynthetic origins, and the microbiological and genetic methods used for their discovery. We also describe and discuss the technologies that revolutionized the field, which transitioned from classic genetics to genome-centric discovery approximately two decades ago. We then highlight the most recent advancements and approaches in the current postgenomic era, in which genome mining is a standard operation and high-throughput analytical methods allow parallel discovery of genes and molecules at an unprecedented pace...
April 19, 2024: Annual Review of Biochemistry