Microbes to Man: From Soils and the Depths to Drugs

Abstract

The multiplicity of natural product structures produced by single‐celled microbes from all three domains of life has led to very significant numbers of drugs in many human diseases. This chapter demonstrates that even today, approximately 80 years after the seminal work on penicillin, the microbial world is still a cornucopia of novel structures, but now days, rather than using classical fermentation techniques, the full panoply of genomics, biosynthesis, synthetic modification and serendipity is needed to investigate the incalculable potential of these single‐celled organisms so as to unlock their potential as sources of novel scaffolds upon which to “practice the arts of drug discovery and development.”