Although there has been a steady decline in natural product discovery efforts in the pharmaceutical industry over the last three decades, natural product chemical scaffolds have continued to yield important human antimicrobial agents, immunomodulators, and antitumor agents, as well as plant crop protectants. Natural product discovery is currently undergoing a renaissance based to a large extent on the observations from microbial genome sequencing projects indicating that only a fraction of the potential microbial secondary metabolites from actinomycetes, other eubacteria, and fungi have been discovered so far, and that most secondary metabolite pathways are not expressed under normal laboratory growth conditions. However, the new discipline of “genome mining” has been exploring ways to activate the expression of these “cryptic pathways.” In light of the rapid progress and growing interest in this area, the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology, The Korean Society for Microbiology and Biotechnology, and The Society for Actinomycetes Japan are holding a joint international meeting on “Natural Product Discovery and Development in the Genomic Era.”