Natural products are the richest source of chemical compounds for drug discovery. Particularly, bacterial secondary metabolites are in the spotlight due to advances in genome sequencing and mining, as well as for the potential of biosynthetic pathway manipulation to awake silent (cryptic) gene clusters under laboratory cultivation. Further progress in compound detection, such as the development of the tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) molecular networking approach, has contributed to the discovery of novel bacterial natural products. The latter can be applied directly to bacterial crude extracts for identifying and dereplicating known compounds, therefore assisting the prioritization of extracts containing novel natural products, for example. In our opinion, these three approaches-genome mining, silent pathway induction, and MS-based molecular networking-compose the tripod for modern bacterial natural product discovery and will be discussed in this perspective.
Keywords: bacterial secondary metabolites; biosynthesis; cryptic gene clusters; drug discovery; genome mining; mass spectrometry; microbial secondary metabolites; molecular networking; natural products.