**Preface to "Natural Product Genomics and Metabolomics of Marine Bacteria"**

In the last decade, bacterial natural product research has changed. The technical advances in genome sequencing have led to an enormous increase of available sequence information. In parallel, fast, and efficient bioinformatic pipelines to mine all these sequences for natural product biosynthesis genes have emerged. These improvements now allow for the cheap and rapid estimation of an organism's biosynthetic potential, and comparing it to that of other organisms, a procedure called "genome mining".

On the other hand, the development of innovative metabolomics workflows, mostly based on high resolution tandem mass spectrometry, enables the quick identification of natural products from complex samples, the visualization of their structural relationships in molecular networks, and the rapid dereplication of known natural products from metabolomic datasets.

Currently, several innovative approaches to link metabolomic and genomic datasets are being developed and explored. These are anticipated to further improve natural product discovery workflows in the next decade.

This Special Issue on the topic contains twelve articles. In addition to a short review on recent advances in linking bacterial genomic and metabolomic information (1), a collection of original research articles, written by experts in the field has been assembled. The articles cover diverse topics, such as natural product discovery approaches from larger genomic and metabolomic datasets (2,3), the development of novel strategies for natural product discovery workflows (4,5), comparative genomic studies analyzing the natural product potential of marine organisms (6,7), the isolation and structure elucidation of bioactive specialized metabolites (8–10), as well as studies on degrading enzymes of marine bacteria (11,12).

I would like to thank all authors for their meaningful and exciting contributions to this Special Issue. Furthermore, all reviewers of the articles and the editorial team of *Marine Drugs* are acknowledged for their help in creating this diverse collection of stimulating state-of-the-art research articles in the field of marine natural products.

> **Max Cr ¨usemann** *Editor*
