Recent Advances in Discovery of Lead Structures from Microbial Natural Products: Genomics- and Metabolomics-Guided Acceleration

• Main Author: Linda Sukmarini
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-04-01
• Series: Molecules
• Subjects: drug discovery; natural products; bioinformatics; genome mining; bioanalytics
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/26/9/2542

Natural products (NPs) are evolutionarily optimized as drug-like molecules and remain the most consistently successful source of drugs and drug leads. They offer major opportunities for finding novel lead structures that are active against a broad spectrum of assay targets, particularly those from secondary metabolites of microbial origin. Due to traditional discovery approaches’ limitations relying on untargeted screening methods, there is a growing trend to employ unconventional secondary metabolomics techniques. Aided by the more in-depth understanding of different biosynthetic pathways and the technological advancement in analytical instrumentation, the development of new methodologies provides an alternative that can accelerate discoveries of new lead-structures of natural origin. This present mini-review briefly discusses selected examples regarding advancements in bioinformatics and genomics (focusing on genome mining and metagenomics approaches), as well as bioanalytics (mass-spectrometry) towards the microbial NPs-based drug discovery and development. The selected recent discoveries from 2015 to 2020 are featured herein.