title: Breaking the silence: new strategies for discovering novel natural products.
abstract: Natural products have been a prolific source of antibacterial and anticancer drugs for decades. One of the major challenges in natural product discovery is that the vast majority of natural product biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) have not been characterized, partially due to the fact that they are either transcriptionally silent or expressed at very low levels under standard laboratory conditions. Here we describe the strategies developed in recent years (mostly between 2014-2016) for activating silent BGCs. These strategies can be broadly divided into two categories: approaches in native hosts and approaches in heterologous hosts. In addition, we briefly discuss recent advances in developing new computational tools for identification and characterization of BGCs and high-throughput methods for detection of natural products.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, United States.
authors.forename: Hengqian
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.affiliation: Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, United States.
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, United States; Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, United States; Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, United States. Electronic address: zhao5@illinois.edu.
authors.forename: Huimin
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhao
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents / Q000096:biosynthesis; D001688:Biological Products / Q000302:isolation & purification* / Q000378:metabolism; D055808:Drug Discovery / Q000379:methods*; D015964:Gene Expression Regulation, Bacterial; D057166:High-Throughput Screening Assays / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D005810:Multigene Family / Q000502:physiology; D034622:RNA Interference; D014158:Transcription, Genetic
chemical_list: D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents; D001688:Biological Products