Microbial production of small medicinal molecules and biologics: From nature to synthetic pathways

Natural products are promising chemicals due to their structural diversity and bioactivities. Over the decades, a vast variety of gene clusters encoding natural products have been identified and overexpressed in microbes. Recently, the development of metabolic engineering, synthetic biology and bioinformatics strategies have facilitated target discovery and design. Microbial cells have been therefore constantly engineered for product accumulation. This review summarizes approaches of domesticating microbial hosts in producing major classes of natural products, with an emphasis on recent advances.