Recent advances in genome-based polyketide discovery

Polyketides are extraordinarily diverse secondary metabolites of great pharmacological value and with interesting ecological functions. The post-genomics era has led to fundamental changes in natural product research by inverting the workflow of secondary metabolite discovery. As opposed to traditional bioactivity-guided screenings, genome mining is an in silico method to screen and analyze sequenced genomes for natural product biosynthetic gene clusters. Since genes for known compounds can be recognized at the early computational stage, genome mining presents an opportunity for dereplication. This review highlights recent progress in bioinformatics, pathway engineering and chemical analytics to extract the biosynthetic secrets hidden in the genome of both well-known natural product sources as well as previously neglected bacteria.