For more than half a century the
pharmaceutical industry has sifted
through natural products produced by microbes, uncovering new scaffolds
and fashioning them into a broad range of vital drugs. We sought a
strategy to reinvigorate the discovery of natural products with distinctive
structures using bacterial genome sequencing combined with metabolomics.
By correlating genetic content from 178 actinomycete genomes with
mass spectrometry-enabled analyses of their exported metabolomes,
we paired new secondary metabolites with their biosynthetic gene clusters.
We report the use of this new approach to isolate and characterize
tambromycin, a new chlorinated natural product, composed of several
nonstandard amino acid monomeric units, including a unique pyrrolidine-containing
amino acid we name tambroline. Tambromycin shows antiproliferative
activity against cancerous human B- and T-cell lines. The discovery
of tambromycin via large-scale correlation of gene clusters with metabolites
(a.k.a. metabologenomics) illuminates a path for structure-based discovery
of natural products at a sharply increased rate.