Antibiotic Discovery in the Genomic Era: Unlocking the Chemical Potential of Microbes

Dear Colleagues,

Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest and longest-lasting challenges to global health. There is an urgent and growing need for new antibiotic classes to maintain the advanced medical procedures we now take for granted. In the golden age of antibiotic discovery, the vast majority of new antibiotic scaffolds were discovered through cultivation of soil microorganisms. However, the chemical diversity of these easy-to-culture microorganisms seems exhausted and has led to the high rediscovery rate of known antibiotics.

In recent years, analysis of microbial genomes has increasingly uncovered the potential of microorganisms to make novel molecules, which is largely underestimated due to the silence or low expression of many biosynthetic genes. Activation or upregulation of the untapped biosynthetic potential will open up a new avenue for antibiotic discovery in the genomic era. This Special Issue aims at gathering updates and recent advances in the discovery and characterization of new antibiotics discovered from microorganisms applying advanced chemical and biological elicitation approaches, including but not limited to chemical elicitation, co-cultivation, resistance gene-directed genome mining, heterologous pathway expression, or regulator overexpression. Contributions should highlight the techniques employed to unlock the antibiotic biosynthetic potential of microorganisms and include details in the isolation, structure characterization, and antimicrobial evaluation of new antibiotics.

Dr. Zhuo Shang
Dr. Jie Li
Guest Editors

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• Antibiotic discovery 
• Microbial secondary metabolites 
• Genome-mining 
• Heterologous expression 
• Structure elucidation 
• Mechanism of action