Natural products as design templates

Interactions of microbial sources, genomics, and synthetic chemistry 

In 2006, microbial and chemical groups at Merck demonstrated that by screening their older microbial extract libraries against novel screens utilizing antisense technologies. 

As a result of the genomic explosion alluded to earlier, it is now quite evident that the earlier postulates of Zahner ° were fundamentally correct. What has become evident over the last five to ten or so years, initially from the work of Hopwood, is that the genome of the Streptomycetes and by extension, Actinomycetes in general, contain large numbers of previously unrecognized secondary metabolite clusters. 

CHAPTER 8 Natural Products as Pharmaceuticals and Sources for Lead Structures 

Many more examples of the value of this type of investigation are in the literature with two recent reviews giving up to date information on the manifold structures that can be found by expression of environmental DNA. This work was pioneered by Handelsman in her studies on zwittermicin production by use of bacterial artificial chromosomes in 1999, which followed on from work on this antibiotic originally published in 1994. 

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