Natural products have played an invaluable role in drug development, as about 24 percent of approved drugs belong to natural products or their derivative. Compared with the limitation of medicinal resources such as plants and animals, microbes from soil, air, ocean and even endophytes, have now become a potential source for drug lead discovery, due to their abundant sources and characteristic biosynthetic pathways for novel bioactive compounds. The ability of all living organisms to biosynthesize endogenous, specialized small molecules is genetically encoded. The magnitude of biosynthetic gene clusters in microbial genome suggests that the secondary metabolite wealth of microbe is largely untapped. Mining algorithms and scalable expression platforms have greatly expanded access to the chemical repertoire of microbial secondary metabolites.

The current Research Topic aims to discover bioactive natural products from microbes as drug leads, using new technologies such as metagenomics and gene mining to look for the breakthrough of new drug research and development. In light of the current clinical drug needs, integrating technologies and methods of microbiology, genomics, natural medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, synthetic biology, etc, focusing on the areas of drug discovery, activity evaluation, structure modification and biogenic synthesis, yield improvement of bioactive products. The research on new sources of microbial resources to expand the existing microbial pool, is promoting the development of innovative drugs.

We welcome submissions of different types of manuscripts including Original Research articles and Reviews, including but not limited to:
• Isolation, structure elucidation and biological activities of novel microbial natural products from unique ecological niche.
• Investigation of active compounds after genetic mining or engineering.
• Biosynthesis of diverse microbial secondary metabolites.
• Structure modification for improvement of lead compounds.

All the manuscripts submitted to the collection will need to fully comply with the Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (you can freely download the full version here

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Frontiers in Chemistry

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