<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The reconstruction of a natural product biosynthetic pathway from bacteria in a vector and subsequent heterologous expression in a technically amenable microbial system represents an efficient alternative to empirical traditional methods for functional discovery, yield improvement, and genetic engineering to produce “unnatural” derivatives. However, the traditional cloning procedure based on genomic library construction and screening are complicated due to the large size (>10 kb) of most biosynthetic pathways. Here, we describe the direct cloning of a partial syringolin biosynthetic gene cluster (<jats:italic>sylCDE</jats:italic>, 19 kb) from a digested genomic DNA mixture of <jats:italic>Pseudomonas syringae</jats:italic> into a plasmid in which <jats:italic>sylCDE</jats:italic> is under the control of an inducible promoter by one step linear‐plus‐linear homologous recombination (LLHR) in <jats:italic>Escherichia coli</jats:italic>. After expression in <jats:italic>E. coli</jats:italic> GB05‐MtaA, two new syringolin derivatives were discovered. The complete syringolin gene cluster was assembled by addition of sylAB and exchange of a synthetic bidirectional promoter against the native promoter to drive <jats:italic>sylB</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>sylC</jats:italic> expression by using Red/ET recombineering. The varying production distribution of syringolin derivatives showed the different efficiencies of native and synthetic promoters in <jats:italic>E. coli</jats:italic>. The successful reconstitution and expression of the syringolin biosynthetic pathway shows that Red/ET recombineering is an efficient tool to clone and engineer secondary metabolite biosynthetic pathways.