Actinomycetes are excellent sources for novel bioactive
compounds, which serve as potential drug candidates for
antibiotics development. While industrial efforts to find
and develop novel antimicrobials have been severely
reduced during the past two decades, the increasing
threat of multidrug-resistant pathogens and the develop-
ment of new technologies to find and produce such
compounds have again attracted interest in this field.
Based on improvements in whole-genome sequencing,
novel methods have been developed to identify the sec-
ondary metabolite biosynthetic gene clusters by genome
mining, to clone them, and to express them in heterolo-
gous hosts in much higher throughput than before.
These technologies now enable metabolic engineering
approaches to optimize production yields and to directly
manipulate the pathways to generate modified products