Content: The epothilones are a new class of anticancer agents derived from myxobacterium Sorangium cellulosum fermentation.To identify conserved and heterogeneous sequences from multiple clusters, we obtained three epothilone producers using an efficient PCR-based method, and the entire epothilone biosynthetic gene cluster of an alkali-tolerant Sorangium cellulosum strain, So0157-2, was sequenced using cosmid/fosmid libraries.