Development of concepts for the genomic mining of novel secondary metabolites in symbiotic cyanobacteria Since the golden era of antibiotics natural products are of ever growing interest to both basic research and applied sciences as they are the main source of new bioactive compounds delivering lead structures for new pharmaceuticals with potent antibiotic anti inflammatory or anti cancer activities. Alongside the technological advances in high throughput genome sequencing and the better understanding of the general organization of those modular biosynthetic assembly lines of secondary metabolites there was also a shift from wet lab screening of active cell extracts towards algorithm based in silico screening for new natural product biosynthesis gene clusters (BGCs). Although the increasing availability of full genome sequences revealed that such non ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS) polyketide synthases (PKS) and ribosomally synthesized and post translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) can be found in all three kingdoms of life certain phyla like actinobacteria and cyanobacteria show a very high density of these secondary ...