Biosynthesis Meets Bioinformatics

摘要

Natural products continue to be a fertile ground for chemical and biochemical inquiry and serve as an invaluable source of some of the most widely used agents in human medicine, such as the antibiotics erythromycin, tetracycline, and penicillin, the anticancer agent taxol, and the cholesterol-lowering drug mevinolin, not to mention plant extracts used widely in dietary supplements and traditional medicine. Studies of the biosynthesis of natural products have revealed the origins of many of these biologically important and chemically complex substances and have been an invaluable tool for the discovery of new biochemical reactions. Traditionally, these studies have relied primarily on incorporation experiments with isotopically labeled precursors and on isolating new enzymes catalyzing individual transformations in multistep biosynthetic pathways. Two recent publications illustrate the continuing role of biosynthetic studies in unearthing new biochemistry and highlight the increasing role of molecular biology and genomics in this quest.