From chemical structure to environmental biosynthetic pathways: navigating marine invertebrate–bacteria associations

Many natural products from marine invertebrates are promising drugs or drug leads but the problem of supply has delayed the development of these agents. Bacteria living in complex associations with animals are often proposed to be the real producers of ‘invertebrate’ metabolites. Recent advances in biosynthetic pathway discovery from these symbiotic bacteria herald a new era in which biosynthetic genes will be cloned rapidly to provide promising molecules from marine invertebrates.