Polyketide pas de deux

Two groups have reported methods that overcome key obstacles to studying polyketide biosynthesis in symbiotic and single organisms. Each method advances the exploration of the chemical space for polyketides, which are important for their antibiotic, anticancer, anti-inflammatory and other therapeutic activities, but more experiments are needed to evaluate the full potential of the methods.

One approach used the structures of polyketides produced by bacterial symbionts of marine sponges as a starting point for identifying the corresponding polyketide synthases (PKSs), which are the enzymes that synthesize and assemble ketide structures into polyketide chains and rings.¹ The second tactic consisted of coaxing a fungus into expressing ordinarily silent genes in its genome and then identifying any unusual polyketides that resulted.²...