Progress on targeted discovery of microbial natural products based on the predictions of both structure and activity

Covering: up to 2025Microbial natural products (NPs) with diverse structures and fascinating activities are a fertile source of drug discovery. Genomic and metagenomic data have revealed that there are abundant valuable resources to be explored. With the advancement in technology, methods for discovering NPs from microorganisms are undergoing notable changes. In this highlight article, we summarized different NP discovery methods into activity-guided and structure-guided categories, emphasizing the characteristics of target compounds and providing typical examples of NPs. We primarily focused on recently developed representative methods that can simultaneously predict the structure and activity features of target compounds as well as the discovery trends of NPs reflected by these cutting-edge methods.