Biosynthetic Engineering of Natural Products

The marriage between synthetic biology and the traditional strengths of the pharmaceutical industry offers the potential of customized molecules with significantly higher binding to hitherto undruggable proteins. Systems biology and bioinformatics will be essential for distilling the vast amounts of gene, protein, and metabolite data that have been collected in recent years into a form that can enable drug discovery by identifying new targets and therapeutic mechanisms, as well as serving as an information conduit to synthetic biology. This book educates readers about this new paradigm of drug discovery.