The Natural Products Discovery Center (NPDC) at UF Scripps Biomedical Research houses one of the world’s largest actinobacterial strain collections, totaling ~125,000 strains.  These strains, isolated over the last eight decades and from 69 different countries, encode natural product chemical and biological diversity that are impossible to reproduce in laboratory settings today. Professor Shen will talk about his group's efforts to launch a large-scale genome sequencing campaign to establish the Natural Products Genomics Resource Center (NPGRC) at NPDC. The sequenced genomes will be used to create the NPGRC database, which, together with the strains, will be made available to the scientific community to enable natural product studies and drug discovery.