RECENT ADVANCES IN COMBINATORIAL BIOSYNTHESIS OF POLYKETIDES: PERSPECTIVES AND CHALLENGES

Natural products continue to inspire scientists on the search for biological active structures. Recent advances in synthetic biology allow modifying genes to extend structural diversity present on natural products by changing important functional groups guided through genetic information. In this context, polyketides synthases (PKS) represent a class of enzymes from where the first applications and well succeed modifications were achieved. During the last two decades PKSs have been extensively studied, sequenced and deposited in data banks available to scientific community around the world. This newly wide information associated to different methodologies accessible to modify the PKSs genetic circuits including genetic insertion, gene deletion and gene replacement leads to discovery of new natural products. In this review, the recent advances in combinatorial biosynthesis, as well as modern techniques in synthetic biology to promote structural diversity on natural products will be discussed.