Keystone Symposia: Natural Products and Synthetic Biology: Parts and Pathways

Keystone Symposia

Natural products, the structurally diverse family of small molecules produced by living organisms in an idiosyncratic fashion, have provided the basis for the majority of our therapeutic agents used to treat infectious disease, cancer and immune disorders. Whole genome sequencing of producing organisms, especially bacteria and fungi, continues to reveal that we have discovered only a fraction of these genetically encoded small molecules. Closing this gap between our current inventory and the genomic potential has become an important goal for basic and applied science; synthetic biology coupled with bioinformatic analysis has become the primary research tool for this effort. Bioinformatic mining continues to reveal the enzymes and pathways that nature uses, and synthetic biology has begun to reassemble or refactor these pathways to produce known and unknown products in new hosts. This conference brings together researchers in fields ranging from microbiology to botany, bioinformatics to gene synthesis and assembly, and basic research to industrial applications. 

NCCIH partially supports this scientific meeting through the R13 award.