Contemporary strategies for targeted discovery and transcriptional activation of natural product biosynthetic gene clusters

Soil samples represent some of the most complex microbial consortia known, with upward of 10,000 unique species per gram in some cases. Metagenome libraries constructed from these consortia provide access to an enormous pool of biosynthetic gene clusters that have the potential to yield new, medicinally relevant natural products. This presentation will discuss two approaches aimed at generating an efficient, and broadly applicable metagenome based natural product discovery platform: First, biosynthetic profiling methodologies that use short DNA sequence tags to guide recovery of gene cluster encoding specific compounds of interest will be discussed. Following this, generally applicable synthetic biological strategies for modifying biosynthetic gene clusters to enable the production, isolation and characterization of new chemical entities will be presented.