If you look at the biggest genes in soil and marine bacteria, you tend to see the chemical blueprints for making natural products such as peptides and polyketides. Over the past decade, collective efforts of enzymologists working with synthetic and analytical chemists have been catching up with the data dump from microbial genome sequencing. Following this story line, we now understand how cyanobacteria construct scaffolds for the related natural products curacin and jamaicamide using subtle tweaks to non-standard biosynthetic machinery.