Focus


Biosynthesis

This special issue features Commentaries, Reviews and Perspectives highlighting advances in our understanding of natural product biosynthesis at the chemical, structural, informatic and ecological level, along with new opportunities to create natural product analogs for a variety of applications.

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Editorial

Focus on Biosynthesis

Looking for logic p619

doi:10.1038/nchembio.1905

Improved tools and expanding knowledge are enabling new insights into the biochemical basis, ecological roles and promising applications of natural product biosynthesis.


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Commentaries

Focus on Biosynthesis

A chemocentric view of the natural product inventory pp620 - 624

Christopher T Walsh

doi:10.1038/nchembio.1894

As the identification of previously undetected microbial biosynthetic pathways burgeons, there arises the question of how much new chemistry is yet to be found. This, in turn, devolves to: what kinds of biosynthetic enzymatic transformations are yet to be characterized?


Focus on Biosynthesis

Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster Open pp625 - 631

Marnix H Medema, Renzo Kottmann, Pelin Yilmaz, Matthew Cummings, John B Biggins, Kai Blin, Irene de Bruijn, Yit Heng Chooi, Jan Claesen, R Cameron Coates, Pablo Cruz-Morales, Srikanth Duddela, Stephanie Düsterhus, Daniel J Edwards, David P Fewer, Neha Garg, Christoph Geiger, Juan Pablo Gomez-Escribano, Anja Greule, Michalis Hadjithomas, Anthony S Haines, Eric J N Helfrich, Matthew L Hillwig, Keishi Ishida, Adam C Jones, Carla S Jones, Katrin Jungmann, Carsten Kegler, Hyun Uk Kim, Peter Kötter, Daniel Krug, Joleen Masschelein, Alexey V Melnik, Simone M Mantovani, Emily A Monroe, Marcus Moore, Nathan Moss, Hans-Wilhelm Nützmann, Guohui Pan, Amrita Pati, Daniel Petras, F Jerry Reen, Federico Rosconi, Zhe Rui, Zhenhua Tian, Nicholas J Tobias, Yuta Tsunematsu, Philipp Wiemann, Elizabeth Wyckoff, Xiaohui Yan, Grace Yim, Fengan Yu, Yunchang Xie, Bertrand Aigle, Alexander K Apel, Carl J Balibar, Emily P Balskus, Francisco Barona-Gómez, Andreas Bechthold, Helge B Bode, Rainer Borriss, Sean F Brady, Axel A Brakhage, Patrick Caffrey, Yi-Qiang Cheng, Jon Clardy, Russell J Cox, René De Mot, Stefano Donadio, Mohamed S Donia, Wilfred A van der Donk, Pieter C Dorrestein, Sean Doyle, Arnold J M Driessen, Monika Ehling-Schulz, Karl-Dieter Entian, Michael A Fischbach, Lena Gerwick, William H Gerwick, Harald Gross, Bertolt Gust, Christian Hertweck, Monica Höfte, Susan E Jensen, Jianhua Ju, Leonard Katz, Leonard Kaysser, Jonathan L Klassen, Nancy P Keller, Jan Kormanec, Oscar P Kuipers, Tomohisa Kuzuyama, Nikos C Kyrpides, Hyung-Jin Kwon, Sylvie Lautru, Rob Lavigne, Chia Y Lee, Bai Linquan, Xinyu Liu, Wen Liu, Andriy Luzhetskyy, Taifo Mahmud, Yvonne Mast, Carmen Méndez, Mikko Metsä-Ketelä, Jason Micklefield, Douglas A Mitchell, Bradley S Moore, Leonilde M Moreira, Rolf Müller, Brett A Neilan, Markus Nett, Jens Nielsen, Fergal O'Gara, Hideaki Oikawa, Anne Osbourn, Marcia S Osburne, Bohdan Ostash, Shelley M Payne, Jean-Luc Pernodet, Miroslav Petricek, Jörn Piel, Olivier Ploux, Jos M Raaijmakers, José A Salas, Esther K Schmitt, Barry Scott, Ryan F Seipke, Ben Shen, David H Sherman, Kaarina Sivonen, Michael J Smanski, Margherita Sosio, Evi Stegmann, Roderich D Süssmuth, Kapil Tahlan, Christopher M Thomas, Yi Tang, Andrew W Truman, Muriel Viaud, Jonathan D Walton, Christopher T Walsh, Tilmann Weber, Gilles P van Wezel, Barrie Wilkinson, Joanne M Willey, Wolfgang Wohlleben, Gerard D Wright, Nadine Ziemert, Changsheng Zhang, Sergey B Zotchev, Rainer Breitling, Eriko Takano & Frank Oliver Glöckner

doi:10.1038/nchembio.1890

A wide variety of enzymatic pathways that produce specialized metabolites in bacteria, fungi and plants are known to be encoded in biosynthetic gene clusters. Information about these clusters, pathways and metabolites is currently dispersed throughout the literature, making it difficult to exploit. To facilitate consistent and systematic deposition and retrieval of data on biosynthetic gene clusters, we propose the Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster (MIBiG) data standard.


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Perspectives

Focus on Biosynthesis

Computational approaches to natural product discovery pp639 - 648

Marnix H Medema & Michael A Fischbach

doi:10.1038/nchembio.1884


Focus on Biosynthesis

Reinvigorating natural product combinatorial biosynthesis with synthetic biology pp649 - 659

Eunji Kim, Bradley S Moore & Yeo Joon Yoon

doi:10.1038/nchembio.1893


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