"We use genomics and informatics to find a gene cluster. But that's an information unit," Verdine says. "We have to get the molecule. Synthetic biology involves

"We use genomics and informatics to find a gene cluster. But that's an information unit," Verdine says. "We have to get the molecule. Synthetic biology involves coaxing the cluster into biosynthetic factories, which then produce the molecules. If we don't have the molecule, the cluster is useless." Once you have a scalable process for producing chemicals that are potential drugs via DNA sequencing & analysis and bacterial synthesis, how do you figure out what disease process to test those chemicals against? Do you shotgun them against a large set of disease processes? Purify the product, analyze it, and store it in a database and do theoretical work to pick out candidate diseases for the chemical? Is there something about the gene cluster that gives clues as to what the chemical might be doing for the organism?