The pursuit of new natural product drugs was at its height in the 1950s and 1960s,the golden age of antibiotic discovery.From the 1970s the pace of discovery slowed,natural products were perceived as exhausted and new strategies for drug discovery were followed.Since then the diversity of microorganisms detected in the environment has exploded and the contribution of uncultured organisms recognised.And analysis of the search and discovery data revealed that the wealth of bioactive metabolites from the most prolific group of bacteria.