Editorial overview: Antimicrobials: Tackling AMR in the 21st century.

Our own article in this issue gives a brief overview of the history ofantibiotics, a summary of the current state of play with regards to thedevelopment of new therapeutics and our personal perspective on theprospects for future antimicrobial drug discovery. Lucy Foulston explainsthe field of genome mining, which uses bioinformatic methods to predictbiosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) that encode the biosynthesis of novelbioactive metabolites in bacterial and fungal genomes. Many of theseBGCs are not expressed under standard laboratory growth conditions andthe signals and signalling pathways that induce their expression are notknown.