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Covering: up to mid-2020 Terpenoids, also called isoprenoids, are the largest and most structurally diverse family of natural products. Found in all domains of life, there are over 80 000 known compounds. The majority of characterized terpenoids, which include some of the most well known, pharmaceutically relevant, and commercially valuable natural products, are produced by plants and fungi. Comparatively, terpenoids of bacterial origin are rare. This is counter-intuitive to the fact that recent microbial genomics revealed that almost all bacteria have the biosynthetic potential to create the C5 building blocks necessary for terpenoid biosynthesis. In this review, we catalogue terpenoids produced by bacteria. We collected 1062 natural products, consisting of both primary and secondary metabolites, and classified them into two major families and 55 distinct subfamilies. To highlight the structural and chemical space of bacterial terpenoids, we discuss their structures, biosynthesis, and biological activities. Although the bacterial terpenome is relatively small, it presents a fascinating dichotomy for future research. Similarities between bacterial and non-bacterial terpenoids and their biosynthetic pathways provides alternative model systems for detailed characterization while the abundance of novel skeletons, biosynthetic pathways, and bioactivies presents new opportunities for drug discovery, genome mining, and enzymology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural products have been playing an indispensable role in drug discovery. However, it seems that the golden period of discovering new compounds has passed since the first antibiotic–penicillin. With the development of genome sequencing, it has been found that marine fungi contain various biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs), which are silent under standard laboratory conditions. Therefore, it might be envisioned that once these BGCs are expressed, a large quantity of new secondary metabolites with biological activities could be generated. This paper reviewed several activation techniques implemented from 2020 to 2022, including epigenetics regulation, co-culture, precursor feeding, heterologous expression, and changing fermentation parameters to activate silent BGCs of marine fungi. We also described the diversity and bioactivities of these newly discovered uncommon marine fungi-derived compounds based on the classification of activation techniques, facilitating research groups focusing on natural products to enhance discovering efficiency. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]