Genetic engineering to produce polyketide analogues

Polyketides are pharmaceutically important and structurally diverse natural products. Creating analogues for drug development can be done with chemistry, but this is generally restricted to a few accessible functional groups. Analogues can also be made by genetic engineering, which is particularly effective for polyketides synthesized by a modular polyketide synthase (PKS). Such a PKS displays colinearity, which means that the structural features along the polyketide chain are determined by the catalytic specificities in corresponding modules along a molecular assembly line. The assembly line can be genetically engineered through addition, deletion, or mutation of catalytic domains or the reorganization of whole modules. Chemically synthesized precursors also can be fed to engineered assembly lines to further expand the repertoire of analogues. These various methods are discussed with an aim of providing a guide to the strategies most likely to succeed in a given circumstance. Recent information that could be relevant to future polyketide engineering projects is also discussed.