A wealth of microbial gene clusters that encode novel biosynthetic pathways (or interesting variants of those already described) to bioactive microbial products, also known as secondary or specialized metabolites, are being unveiled with the ever increasing number of sequenced microbial genomes. These data confirm the primary role that some microbial groups such as actinomycetes, filamentous ascomycetes, cyanobacteria, and myxobacteria have had and might still continue to have in fulfilling pharmaceutical product pipelines and responding to unmet clinical needs. Whereas the difficulty to discover and develop in a reasonable time and acceptable cost new products from microbial sources has been widely recognized, recent advances in gene mining and heterologous expression, knowledge on regulatory networks, new analytical deconvolution, and chemical characterization tools are opening new avenues in the field of natural product discovery.

We invite authors to submit original research and review articles that address the understanding and eventually facing the current bottlenecks in the process of microbial product discovery and development. The invitation is directed to those investigators that are involved in classical and innovative microbial product screening projects, in chemical dereplication of microbial active extracts, in genome mining, in triggering cryptic gene clusters, in developing fermentation process and analytical tools, and in strain improvement of microbes producing interesting bioactive molecules as a result of their specialized (secondary) metabolic pathways.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• New resources for drug discovery including marine organisms, plant-associated microorganisms, and microorganisms from tropical forests
• Genome mining: promises and limitations
• Advantages and disadvantages of classical biological activity-guided microbial product screening
• Novel strategies of microbial product screening
• Chemical, biological, and bioinformatics tools for dereplication of active microbial extracts
• Fermentation medium and process development
• Classical strain improvement (mutagenesis and selection) versus DNA-based rational engineering
• Tools and bottlenecks in homologous and heterologous expression of biosynthetic clusters
• Analytical tools to assist strain and process development
• Biological and chemical issues related to pharmaceutical guidelines’ compliance