Biosynthesis and combinatorial biosynthesis of antifungal nucleoside antibiotics.

There is an urgent need for new antifungal agents to treat or combat fungal infection in humans and plants. Antifungal nucleoside antibiotics are an important family of natural products with distinctive structural features. Understanding their biosynthetic machinery is of great importance for the improvement of antibiotics titers. More importantly, it is a requisite for combinatorial biosynthesis to create hybrid nucleoside antibiotics. We herein focus on findings on the natural and designed biosynthesis of this important family of nucleoside antibiotics.