Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 16, Issue 15, 2016

Natural products (NPs) are the most historically bountiful source of chemical matter for drug development—especially for anti-infectives. With insights gleaned from genome mining, interest in natural product discovery has been reinvigorated. An essential stage in NP discovery is structural elucidation, which sheds light not only on the chemical composition of a molecule but also its novelty, properties, and derivatization potential. The history of structure elucidation is replete with techniquebased revolutions: combustion analysis, crystallography, UV, IR, MS, and NMR have each provided game-changing advances; the latest such advance is genomics. All natural products have a genetic basis, and the ability to obtain and interpret genomic information for structure elucidation is increasingly available at low cost to non-specialists. In this review, we describe the value of genomics as a structural elucidation technique, especially from the perspective of the natural product chemist approaching an unknown metabolite. Herein we first introduce the databases and programs of interest to the natural products chemist, with an emphasis on those currently most suited for general usability. We describe strategies for linking observed natural product-linked phenotypes to their corresponding gene clusters. We then discuss techniques for extracting structural information from genes, illustrated with numerous case examples. We also provide an analysis of the biases and limitations of the field with recommendations for future development. Our overview is not only aimed at biologically-oriented researchers already at ease with bioinformatic techniques, but also, in particular, at natural product, organic, and/or medicinal chemists not previously familiar with genomic techniques.

Microbes are important producers of natural products, which have played key roles in understanding biology and treating disease. However, the full potential of microbes to produce natural products has yet to be realized; the overwhelming majority of natural product gene clusters encoded in microbial genomes remain “cryptic”, and have not been expressed or characterized. In contrast to the fast-growing number of genomic sequences and bioinformatic tools, methods to connect these genes to natural product molecules are still limited, creating a bottleneck in genome-mining efforts to discover novel natural products. Here we review developing technologies that leverage the power of homologous recombination to directly capture natural product gene clusters and express them in model hosts for isolation and structural characterization. Although direct capture is still in its early stages of development, it has been successfully utilized in several different classes of natural products. These early successes will be reviewed, and the methods will be compared and contrasted with existing traditional technologies. Lastly, we will discuss the opportunities for the development of direct capture in other organisms, and possibilities to integrate direct capture with emerging genome-editing techniques to accelerate future study of natural products.

The connection of microbial biosynthetic gene clusters to the small molecule metabolites they encode is central to the discovery and characterization of new metabolic pathways with ecological and pharmacological potential. With increasing microbial genome sequence information being deposited into publicly available databases, it is clear that microbes have the coding capacity for many more biologically active small molecules than previously realized. Of increasing interest are the small molecules encoded by the human microbiome, as these metabolites likely mediate a variety of currently uncharacterized human-microbe interactions that influence health and disease. In this mini-review, we describe the ongoing biosynthetic, structural, and functional characterizations of the genotoxic colibactin pathway in gut bacteria as a thematic example of linking biosynthetic gene clusters to their metabolites. We also highlight other natural products that are produced through analogous biosynthetic logic and comment on some current disconnects between bioinformatics predictions and experimental structural characterizations. Lastly, we describe the use of pathway-targeted molecular networking as a tool to characterize secondary metabolic pathways within complex metabolomes and to aid in downstream metabolite structural elucidation efforts.

The tetrahydroisoquinoline (THIQ) alkaloids are naturally occurring antibiotics isolated from a variety of microorganisms and marine invertebrates. This family of natural products exhibit broad spectrum antimicrobial and strong antitumor activities, and the potency of clinical application has been validated by the marketing of ecteinascidin 743 (ET-743) as anticancer drug. In the past 20 years, the biosynthetic gene cluster of six THIQ antibiotics has been characterized including saframycin Mx1 from Myxococcus xanthus, safracin-B from Pseudomonas fluorescens, saframycin A, naphthyridinomycin, and quinocarcin from Streptomyces, as well as ET-743 from Ecteinascidia turbinata. This review gives a brief summary of the current status in understanding the molecular logic for the biosynthesis of these natural products, which provides new insights on the biosynthetic machinery involved in the nonribosomal peptide synthetase system. The proposal of the THIQ biosynthetic pathway not only shows nature’s route to generate such complex molecules, but also set the stage to develop a different process for production of ET-743 by synthetic biology.

Polycyclic tetramate macrolactams (PTMs), a widely distributed class of structurally complex natural products exhibiting diverse biological activities, share a tetramate-containing macrocyclic lactam ring fused to a subset of carbocyclic rings. More than 30 naturally occurring PTM members have been reported. Representative members include ikarugamycin, HSAF, and alteramides. The emerging significance of PTMs in medicinal applications has raised attentions on their biosynthetic studies. These studies have unveiled the unexpected conservation of compact PTM biosynthetic loci in phylogenetically diverse bacteria and elucidated mechanisms for key steps in PTM biosynthesis. PTMs were demonstrated to be derived from the common origin of a hybrid polyketide synthase (PKS)/nonribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) pathway, in which the PKS portion was iteratively used to generate two separate polyketide chains. A common tetramate-containing polyene intermediate was proposed to be the final product of all PTM PKS/NRPS assembly lines. Subsequently, a set of oxidoreductases acted in a not yet clearly understood way to dictate the manner of cyclizations to yield different polycycle ring systems in PTMs. The only well studied example was the formation of the inner fivemembered ring in ikarugamycin, which was catalyzed by an alcohol dehydrogenase via a [1 + 6] Michael addition. Nonetheless, these studies have illustrated the extraordinary simplicity of nature’s art in the biosynthesis of PTMs with complex structures and paved the way to further expand the structural diversity of the family of medicinally relevant PTMs by genome mining and combinatorial biosynthesis.

Plants produce structurally and functionally diverse natural products. Some of these compounds possess promising health-benefiting properties, such as resveratrol (antioxidant) curcumin (anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic and anticancer), paclitaxel (anticancer) and artemisinin (antimalarial). These compounds are produced through particular biosynthetic pathways in the plants. While supply of these medicinally important molecules relies on extraction from the producing species, recent years have seen significant advances in metabolic engineering of microorganisms for the production of plant natural products. Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae are the two most widely used heterologous hosts for expression of enzymes and reconstitution of plant natural product biosynthetic pathways. Total biosynthesis of many plant polyketide natural products such as curcumin and piceatannol in microorganisms has been achieved. While the late biosynthetic steps of more complex molecules such as paclitaxel and artemisinin remain to be understood, reconstitution of their partial biosynthetic pathways and microbial production of key intermediates have been successful. This review covers recent advances in understanding and engineering the biosynthesis of plant polyketides and terpenoids in microbial hosts.

Non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs) and polyketides (PKs) play key roles in pharmaceutical industry due to their promising biological activities. The structural complexity of NRPs and PKs, however, creates significant synthetic challenges for producing these natural products and their analogues by purely chemical means. Alternatively, difficult syntheses can be achieved by using biosynthetic enzymes with improved efficiency and altered selectivity that are acquired from directed evolution. Key to the successful directed evolution is the methodology of screening/selection. This review summarizes the screening/selection strategies that have been employed to improve or modify the functions of non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) and polyketide synthases (PKSs), in the hope of triggering the wide adoption of the directed evolution approaches in the engineered biosynthesis of NRPs and PKs for drug discovery.