Mining, Deciphering and Engineering of Bacterial Natural Products

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Background

Over the past few decades, natural products from bacteria with complex chemical structures, intriguing biosynthetic mechanisms and diverse biological activities have made them a rich resource for biopharmaceutical development, and beneficial to human health in an unprecedented manner. This is prominently represented by Nobel Prizes being awarded for the discoveries of drugs such as Streptomycin and Avermectin. Recent genome-scale studies have revolutionized our knowledge about the biosynthesis of these fantastic chemical entities, and alerted scientists to the fact that these bacteria have strong genetic potential to produce more natural products than we have already seen. This makes it possible to boost the exploitation of novel microbial natural products based on comprehensive genome mining, molecular mechanism deciphering and biosynthetic pathway engineering. Thus, further extensive studies of natural products from bacteria will not only expand our understanding of biosynthesis, but also increase their potential as new leads for drug development.

Traditional exploitation of natural products from bacteria has met a bottleneck where only a few novel bioactive compounds can be identified from individual microorganism. Thus it is of great scientific interest to fully unlock the genetic potential of bacteria to produce new natural products that could be developed into promising pharmaceuticals. Thanks to the rapid development of biotechnology, e.g. high-throughput multi-omics, efficient genome editing and large-fragment DNA assembly, protein crystallization and cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) for structure elucidation, more natural and unnatural products have been identified, refreshing our knowledge and the chemical pools. This Research Topic will focus on an interdisciplinary approach to achieving advances in the efficient exploitation of natural products from bacteria. We aim to provide a scientific forum for chemical biologists, geneticists, chemists, biochemists and pharmacologists.

This Research Topic is aiming to collect cutting-edge researches and reviews in the forms of Original Research articles, Short Communications, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Methods and Perspectives.

Potential themes include, but are not limited to:

• Multi-omics for novel natural product discovery from bacteria
• Biosynthetic gene cluster cloning and assembly, bacterial cell factory development and heterologous expression
• Reconfiguration of regulatory circuits for activation of cryptic gene clusters
• Elucidation and refactoring of biosynthetic pathways
• Enzymology in biosynthesis and thereof directed evolution
• Metabolic pathway and culture environment engineering for high-value natural products

Keywords: Bacteria, Natural Products, Genome Mining, Biosynthesis and Regulation, Pathway Engineering

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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