چکیده (انگلیسی):

Natural products are among the most important sources of lead molecules for drug discovery. With the
development of affordable whole-genome sequencing technologies and other ‘omics tools, the field of
natural products research is currently undergoing a shift in paradigms. While, for decades, mainly analytical
and chemical methods gave access to this group of compounds, nowadays genomics-based methods
offer complementary approaches to find, identify and characterize such molecules. This paradigm shift
also resulted in a high demand for computational tools to assist researchers in their daily work. In this
context, this review gives a summary of tools and databases that currently are available to mine, identify
and characterize natural product biosynthesis pathways and their producers based on ‘omics
data. A web portal called Secondary Metabolite Bioinformatics Portal (SMBP at http://www
.secondarymetabolites.org) is introduced to provide a one-stop catalog and links to these bioinformatics
resources. In addition, an outlook is presented how the existing tools and those to be developed will
influence synthetic biology approaches in the natural products field.
© 2016 The authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-
nd/4.0/).