Native and engineered promoters in natural product discovery

Covers the period up to 2016

Bacterial-based natural products have long represented a promising resource for the development of commercially relevant therapeutics, and more than two thirds of these products have been developed from members of the genus Streptomyces. The extensive sequencing of bacterial genomes suggests that the majority of gene clusters encoding natural products are silent and not expressed under standard laboratory conditions. However, these clusters can be activated through systematic exchanges between native transcriptionally silent promoters and transcriptionally active promoters. Therefore, the availability of well-studied constitutive and inducible promoters is of the utmost importance for identifying natural products encoded by silent gene clusters. This manuscript provides an overview of the promoter control elements for streptomycetes and examples of their successful application in refactoring the biosynthetic pathways of natural products.