Coupling Mass Spectral and Genomic Information to Improve Bacterial Natural Product Discovery Workflows

Bacterial natural products possess potent bioactivities and high structural diversity and are typically encoded in biosynthetic gene clusters. Traditional natural product discovery approaches rely on UV- and bioassay-guided fractionation and are limited in terms of dereplication. Recent advances in mass spectrometry, sequencing and bioinformatics have led to large-scale accumulation of genomic and mass spectral data that is increasingly used for signature-based or correlation-based mass spectrometry genome mining approaches that enable rapid linking of metabolomic and genomic information to accelerate and rationalize natural product discovery. In this mini-review, these approaches are presented, and discovery examples provided. Finally, future opportunities and challenges for paired omics-based natural products discovery workflows are discussed.