Drug Discovery in Microbial Metabolites: The Search for Microbial Products with Bioactive Properties

Microorganisms produce a wide array of chemically diverse secondary metabolites which are not necessarily anti-microbial in nature. Many of them have turned out to be very important to the pharmaceutical industry, while some are of importance in the agricultural industry. In Chapter 24 we discussed the production of anti-microbial and anti-tumor agents by microorganisms; in this chapter we will look at other products with pharmaceutical relevance outside antibiotics.