Figure 2.

In light of BGF’s decreasing return-on-investment, scientists have developed new natural product discovery methods to tap into the microbial biosynthetic diversity of the “uncultured majority”. Sequence metagenomics and function metagenomics methods are reviewed elsewhere [26–28]. This Perspective focuses on chemical structure metagenomics, an emerging field founded on our ability to predict the chemical structure of natural products based on the sequences of their biosynthetic genes.