Genome Mining: Recent Trends of Drug Discovery in Natural Products

Drug discovery relies on screening for bioactive components in natural sources, such as bacteria, fungi, and plants. Bioactive natural products and secondary metabolites provide the main source for developing new therapeutics, serving as new antibiotics and anticancer agents. With identifying the first biosynthetic genes over the last few decades, scientists now have the tool at their disposal to better understand the genetics and logic behind these biosyntheses. In addition, in this genomic age, one can have access to an increasing number of genomes for reproducible research outcomes. Genome mining, in conjunction with synthetic biology, has become significantly more relevant to drug discovery. In the current chapter, the main aim is to explore how the recent trends of genome mining and synthetic biology approaches can be used to discover novel natural products while highlighting both the benefits and drawbacks of these techniques. We also consider the adjacent methods for the validation of data after genome mining. By reviewing the literature, an attempt was made to finally summarize all-natural drugs obtained by genome-mining from fungi, bacteria, and other microorganisms. 

Keywords: Bacteria, Fungi, Genome, Genome mining, Natural products, Synthetic biology, Therapeutics.