Reinvigorating natural product combinatorial biosynthesis with synthetic biology

Natural products continue to play a pivotal role in drug-discovery efforts and in the understanding if human health. The ability to extend nature's chemistry through combinatorial biosynthesis--altering functional groups, regiochemistry and scaffold backbones through the manipulation of biosynthetic enzymes--offers unique opportunities to create natural product analogs. Incorporating emerging synthetic biology techniques has the potential to further accelerate the refinement of combinatorial biosynthesis as a robust platform for the diversification of natural chemical drug leads. Two decades after the field originated, we discuss the current limitations, the realities and the state of the art of combinatorial biosynthesis, including the engineering of substrate specificity of biosynthetic enzymes and the development of heterologous expression systems for biosynthetic pathways. We also propose a new perspective for the combinatorial biosynthesis of natural products that could reinvigorate drug discovery by using synthetic biology in combination with synthetic chemistry.