Medicinal plants produce a myriad of health-promoting natural products and have been widely used for thousands of years in traditional medical practices,especially in ancient Asia and Africa.However,although a large number of natural products have been isolated and identified from plants by mode chemical and metabolomic methods,there is still a huge gap in understanding the nature of medicinal plant ingredients and the genetic basis of their biosynthesis.Recently,Kersten and Weng (2018) from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research developed a new genome-mining approach to identify the genes responsible for the biosynthesis of lyciumins,a group of cyclic peptides initially isolated from Chinese wolfberry (Lycium barbarum;also called "Goji" in Chinese;Figure 1),a plant species that has long been used for health care purposes in traditional herbal medicine and was found in recent years to be effective in treating hypertension.