Discussion

Natural products are evolutionarily designed and chemically distinct from most synthetic library molecules. In addition to their role as drugs, they are successfully used as molecular probes to identify disease relevant targets in areas of unmet medical need. Novel natural products are still routinely discovered from traditional sources through cultivation of microorganisms. However, sequencing of genomes has revealed that the true biosynthetic capabilities have not been fully leveraged in the past decades. Through varying of physiological parameters during the growth of the microorganisms, use of chemical epigenetic modifiers, molecular genetics for pathway engineering and synthetic biology approaches, the silent metabolome can be investigated.