Many therapeutically relevant natural products are biosynthesized by the action of giant mega-enzyme assembly lines. By leveraging the specificity, promiscuity, and modularity of assembly lines, a variety of strategies have been developed that enable the biosynthesis of modified natural products. This review briefly summarizes recent structural advances related to natural product assembly lines, discusses chemical approaches to probing assembly line structures in the absence of traditional biophysical data, and surveys efforts that harness the inherent or engineered promiscuity of assembly lines for the synthesis of non-natural polyketides and nonribosomal peptide analogues.
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