Welcome to the 5th NP meeting at San Diego
We are thrilled to welcome you to the 5th International Conference on “Natural Product Discovery and Development in the Genomic Era” that will take place January 5th to 9th, 2025, back in sunny San Diego, California.
Following the first three successful conferences in San Diego, California in 2015, 2020 and 2023, and Clearwater Beach, Florida in 2018, the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (SIMB), the Korean Society for Microbiology and Biotechnology (KMB), and the Society of Actinomycetes Japan (SAJ) are cosponsoring the 5th meeting as a venue for dissemination of cutting edge research on natural product biosynthesis and discovery.
The origins of this series of meetings could be traced back to the Genetics and Molecular Biology of Industrial Microorganisms (GMBIM) and Biotechnology of Microbial Products (BMP) meetings. The first ASM Sponsored GMBIM meeting was held in 1976 in Orlando, Florida, followed by meetings in 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992 in Bloomington, Indiana. SIM(B) sponsored the GMBIM Meetings in 1996 and 2000 in Bloomington, and 2004 in San Diego. The first BMP meeting started at this very city, San Diego, in 1988. Both meetings provided outstanding forums for academic and industrial scientists to discuss the latest ideas and developments on the genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology of many industrial microorganisms and their important products, with BMP in particularly focusing on novel microbial metabolites – their discovery, biosynthesis, engineering, production, activity, and drug discovery. The 8th GMBIM and the 8th BMP, a joint meeting held here at San Diego in 2004, was the last SIMB meeting dedicated to microbial metabolites, although various aspects of microbial metabolites are well represented at the SIMB Annual meetings.
Natural product discovery is surely undergoing a renaissance and a transformation. Recent advances in microbial genomics and metagenomics have definitively revealed that the vast majority of earth’s biodiversity is yet to be exploited for natural products discovery. Innovations in microbial cultivation and synthetic biology have radically expanded the chemical space of natural products and demonstrated the feasibility of engineered production of natural products from uncultivated species or species on the verge of extinction in model heterologous hosts. Fundamental understanding of natural product biosynthesis has allowed rational manipulation of Nature’s biosynthetic machinery for the production of both the natural products and their engineered variants. Genome mining for Nature’s myriad of so-called “cryptic” natural product biosynthetic pathways has started to unveil the dark matter of natural products. Emerging strain prioritization, bioinformatics, and metabolomics technologies have revolutionized natural product dereplication, enabling structural prediction, rapid detection, and isolation of the most promising natural products at a rapid pace. New and excting enzymes discovered from biosynthetic pathways are being evolved and used as biocatalysts for synthetic transformations. While challenges remain daunting, the opportunities are enormous, especially with the growing interest and importance of the global bioeconomy.
We have put together an outstanding program, featuring an opening keynote lecture by Nobel Laureat Professor Jennifer Doudna from UC Berkeley. The banquet address will be presented by Dr. Barry O’Keefe from the National Cancer Institute. Seven plenary sessions and two poster sessions, covering different aspects of natural product discovery, characterization and engineering, have been arranged over the four day conference, with a total of 44 invited speakers. To document the current advances in natural products discovery and development, the Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology will publish a Special Issue devoted to the presentations at this meeting in 2025. Two workshops will also be available for attendees, including “GNPS 2.0/CMMCkb enrichment for microbial natural product discovery” by Professor Pieter Dorrestein from UC San Diego; and “New capabilities to study secondary metabolism” by Dr. Hiroshi Otani and colleagues from the Joint Genome Institute.
On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we welcome you to San Diego!
Yi Tang
Brad Moore
Alessandra Eustaquio
Jaclyn Winter