Genombasierte Wege zur Identifikation bioaktiver bakterieller Naturstoffe

Bacteria produce natural products to interact with their environment. These structurally diverse small molecules exhibit various bioactivities and have been exploited for the treatment of many diseases. The discovery pace of truly novel natural products using traditional methods has markedly declined. As an alternative, sophisticated bioinformatic tools have been developed that leverage genome sequence information for the targeted discovery of bioactive compounds. To chart microbial biosynthetic dark matter and identify non-canonical natural product biosynthetic pathways that escape unrecognised by current bioinformatic tools, artificial intelligence has recently been introduced into the genome mining process, holding promise to expand natural product chemical and biosynthetic space.