Chemical structure metagenomics of microbial natural products: surveying nonribosomal peptides and beyond
Thomas Ma, John Chu, Karen N Allen · 2024
Read Chemical structure metagenomics of microbial natural products: surveying nonribosomal peptides and beyond by Thomas Ma, John Chu, Karen N Allen (2024) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-11590018.txt.
Description
Thomas Ma and co-authors wrote a perspective piece from 2024 on a structure-first way to hunt for new natural products from microbes. The classic hunt grows microbes, splits their output, and tests each part for activity. That path keeps rediscovering known compounds. The newer way starts from the genes that build a compound and predicts its shape before anyone isolates it.
Knowing the likely shape lets teams target compounds that look new and skip crowded ground. The method has so far centered on one peptide family built outside the cell's protein factories. It has already surfaced many fresh active molecules and mapped which corners of natural product space are over-fished or barely touched. In principle the lens fits other compound families too. The authors close with where the approach may head, and what it needs to spread.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Thomas Ma, John Chu, Karen N Allen |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2024 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 31 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |