Pathway and Gene Discovery from Natural Hosts and Organisms

: Information in public sequence databases on the genomes and metagenomes of microbes and plants has grown rapidly. In conjunction with technological developments in computational identification of biosynthetic gene clusters, molecular biology, synthetic biology, and analytical tools, this has revealed genes for enzymes with optimal and targeted function, as well as a rich pool of uncharacterized metabolic pathways. This chapter discusses different approaches to discovery of genes and metabolic pathways in microbes and plants in nature, such as genomic mining, transcriptome analysis, and metabolite profiling.