Revolutionizing microbial treasure troves: innovative strategies for natural products discovery

Microorganisms represent Earth's most abundant biological resource, producing metabolites of immense value across medicine, agriculture, and industry. Conventional cultivation and screening techniques, however, suffer from inefficiency and fail to meet contemporary demands. Providing a comprehensive overview, this review details how the One Strain Many Compounds (OSMAC) strategy—addressing cultivation bottlenecks—and genomics-driven mining approaches are revolutionizing the discovery of novel microbial metabolites. Crucially, it underscores the broad adoption of innovative technologies like machine learning to enable faster, more effective gene and structure targeting. Synthesizing case studies from 2019 to 2025, the review catalogs newly identified compounds and their bioactivities, while outlining future research directions to establish a theoretical framework for efficient microbial natural product exploration. These advanced discovery strategies are significantly accelerating the identification of structurally diverse lead compounds with novel mechanisms of action, thereby revitalizing pipelines for new antibiotic, anticancer, and therapeutic drug development.