*Review* **Coupling Mass Spectral and Genomic Information to Improve Bacterial Natural Product Discovery Workflows**

**Max Crüsemann**

Institute for Pharmaceutical Biology, University of Bonn, Nussallee 6, 53115 Bonn, Germany; cruesemann@uni-bonn.de

**Abstract:** Bacterial natural products possess potent bioactivities and high structural diversity and are typically encoded in biosynthetic gene clusters. Traditional natural product discovery approaches rely on UV- and bioassay-guided fractionation and are limited in terms of dereplication. Recent advances in mass spectrometry, sequencing and bioinformatics have led to large-scale accumulation of genomic and mass spectral data that is increasingly used for signature-based or correlation-based mass spectrometry genome mining approaches that enable rapid linking of metabolomic and genomic information to accelerate and rationalize natural product discovery. In this mini-review, these approaches are presented, and discovery examples provided. Finally, future opportunities and challenges for paired omics-based natural products discovery workflows are discussed.

**Keywords:** bacterial natural products; mass spectrometry; genome mining; paired omics
