Modern medicine underwent a major transformation when microbes were first industrially exploited for their ability to produce antibiotic agents. These natural products often belonged to two classes, known as polyketides and nonribosomal peptides. Exhaustive bioactivity screening has lead to the discovery of hundreds of these bioactive compounds, whose rediscovery confounds new exploratory efforts. Still, microbial genomes have shown us that there are many more polyketides and nonribosomal peptides remaining to be discovered. A modern challenge and opportunity exists in our ability to link genomic and metabolomic data, using novel informatic methods to find new bioactive natural products. This “genome-mining” approach, along with other recent informatic platforms for discovering polyketides and nonribosomal peptides will be the focus of this review.
