摘要：The golden age has passed for antibiotic discovery,and while some antibiotics are currently in various phases of clinical trials in the United States,many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned antibiotic *** the need for antibiotics,we should expand our horizon for therapeutic mining and can look toward understudied sources such as ice *** cores contain microorganisms and genetic material that have been frozen in time for thousands of *** antibiotics used by these organisms are encoded in their genomes,which can be unlocked,identified,and characterized with modern advances in molecular biology,genetic sequencing,various computational approaches,and established natural product discovery *** synthetic biology can be used in natural product discovery approaches,synthetic biology and bioengineering efforts can also be leveraged in the selection and biodesign of increased compound yields,potency,and ***,we provide the perspective that ice cores can be a source of novel antibiotic compounds and that the tools of synthetic biology can be used to design better antimicrobials.