Discovery of novel bioactive natural products driven by genome mining

Microbial natural product is an important source for drug discovery. As more and more microbial genomes are sequenced, bioinformatics analysis shows that there are huge resources of novel natural products. Genome mining is a new strategy of natural product discovery based on gene cluster sequences and biosynthetic pathways. At the same time, it can directly associate the structures of natural products with synthetic pathways, and facilitate the study of biosynthesis and combinatorial biosynthesis. In this paper, the strategies of genome mining, including bioinformatics predictions, metabolomic comparisons and genetic manipulations, are reviewed, which shows a great advantage of this strategy in exploiting the potential of microbial natural products. With the development of genome mining methodology and techniques, it will be possible to realize rational exploitation of microbial natural product resources.