Themed collection Emerging investigator Review series

This review covers diverse transcriptional regulators for the activation of secondary metabolism and novel natural product discovery in fungi.

This article reviews CRISPR/Cas9-based toolkits available to investigate natural product biosynthesis and regulation in streptomycete bacteria.

Synthetic-bioinformatic natural product inspired peptides (syn-BNPs) are predicted peptides from biosynthetic gene clusters that are synthetically accessed. This method enables easier access to natural product-like peptides for bioactivity screening.

This review highlights methods for studying structure activity relationships of natural products and proposes that these methods are complementary and could be used to build an iterative computational-experimental workflow.

Ribosomally synthesised and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) are highly promising candidates for drug discovery and development, but challenges remain.

The discovery and characterization of natural product protease inhibitors has inspired the development of numerous pharmaceutical agents.

This review on natural products containing a tropolonoid motif highlights analytical methods applied for structural identification and biosynthetic pathway analysis, the ecological context and the pharmacological potential of this compound class.

Enzymes that catalyze a Michael-type addition in polyketide biosynthesis are summarized and discussed.