Application of microbial biotransformation for the new drug discovery using natural drugs as substrates.

This review describes microbial transformation studies of natural drugs, its importance in correlating them with the corresponding metabolism (biotransformation) in animal system and in the structural modification of complex drug molecules, which are difficult to obtain synthetically. Emphasis is laid on the potential microorganisms, which mimic the pathways of mammalian metabolism and which involve in stereoselective, regiospecific and selective conversions of natural drugs to their derivatives by microorganisms, which are more useful and difficult to synthesize. This paper describes the present state-of-art, will elucidate the additional possibilities with microbial biotransformation of natural drugs, i.e., comparison of microbial transformation with mammalian metabolism and possibility of producing novel molecules, which are difficult to produce by other means.