Lay summary
For over 60 years, antibiotics have been crucial in modern medicine, curing infectious diseases and preventing infections in immunocompromised individuals. However, their overuse has led to an alarming increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, creating a need for new antibiotics with different mechanisms of action. One promising avenue to discovering new antibacterial compounds is exploring natural products in the form of fungal secondary metabolites. Fungi produce various unique secondary metabolites using a small set of precursor molecules as building blocks. Precursor-directed biosynthesis (PDB) is an approach that introduces non-natural precursor molecules into the growth medium of microorganisms to produce modified metabolites with unique biological activities. In this study, Aspergillus terrus 477, a well-studied fungi, will be used as a model to conduct a proof of principle study. PDB has significant potential offering valuable insights into industrial applications such as medicine, agriculture, and other fields.