Diversifying carotenoid biosynthetic pathways by directed evolution.

Microorganisms and plants synthesize a diverse array of natural products, many of which have proven indispensable to human health and well-being. Although many thousands of these have been characterized, the space of possible natural products--those that could be made biosynthetically--remains largely unexplored. For decades, this space has largely been the domain of chemists, who have synthesized scores of natural product analogs and have found many with improved or novel functions. New natural products have also been made in recombinant organisms, via engineered biosynthetic pathways. Recently, methods inspired by natural evolution have begun to be applied to the search for new natural products. These methods force pathways to evolve in convenient laboratory organisms, where the products of new pathways can be identified and characterized in high-throughput screening programs. Carotenoid biosynthetic pathways have served as a convenient experimental system with which to demonstrate these ideas. Researchers have mixed, matched, and mutated carotenoid biosynthetic enzymes and screened libraries of these "evolved" pathways for the emergence of new carotenoid products. This has led to dozens of new pathway products not previously known to be made by the assembled enzymes. These new products include whole families of carotenoids built from backbones not found in nature. This review details the strategies and specific methods that have been employed to generate new carotenoid biosynthetic pathways in the laboratory. The potential application of laboratory evolution to other biosynthetic pathways is also discussed.     

'Sweetening' natural products via glycorandomization

In an effort to explore the contribution of the sugar constituents of pharmaceutically relevant glycosylated natural products, chemists have developed glycosylation methods for the generation of 'glycorandomized' libraries. Each member of these libraries is uniquely differentiated by an attached carbohydrate. Recently, two complementary glycorandomization strategies have emerged: chemoenzymatic glycorandomization, a biocatalytic approach dependent upon the substrate promiscuity of enzymes to activate and attach sugars to natural products, and neoglycorandomization, an efficient one-step chemical sugar ligation reaction that does not require prior sugar protection or activation. These strategies are likely to have a significant impact on fundamental glycoscience and drug discovery.     

New aspects of natural products in drug discovery

During the past 15 years, most large pharmaceutical companies have decreased the screening of natural products for drug discovery in favor of synthetic compound libraries. Main reasons for this include the incompatibility of natural product libraries with high-throughput screening and the marginal improvement in core technologies for natural product screening in the late 1980s and early 1990 s. Recently, the development of new technologies has revolutionized the screening of natural products. Applying these technologies compensates for the inherent limitations of natural products and offers a unique opportunity to re-establish natural products as a major source for drug discovery. Examples of these new advances and technologies are described in this review.     

Diversifying Carotenoid Biosynthetic Pathways by Directed Evolution

Microorganisms and plants synthesize a diverse array of natural products, many of which have proven indispensable to human health and well-being. Although many thousands of these have been characterized, the space of possible natural products—those that could be made biosynthetically—remains largely unexplored. For decades, this space has largely been the domain of chemists, who have synthesized scores of natural product analogs and have found many with improved or novel functions. New natural products have also been made in recombinant organisms, via engineered biosynthetic pathways. Recently, methods inspired by natural evolution have begun to be applied to the search for new natural products. These methods force pathways to evolve in convenient laboratory organisms, where the products of new pathways can be identified and characterized in high-throughput screening programs. Carotenoid biosynthetic pathways have served as a convenient experimental system with which to demonstrate these ideas. Researchers have mixed, matched, and mutated carotenoid biosynthetic enzymes and screened libraries of these “evolved” pathways for the emergence of new carotenoid products. This has led to dozens of new pathway products not previously known to be made by the assembled enzymes. These new products include whole families of carotenoids built from backbones not found in nature. This review details the strategies and specific methods that have been employed to generate new carotenoid biosynthetic pathways in the laboratory. The potential application of laboratory evolution to other biosynthetic pathways is also discussed.     

Using display technologies to identify macrocyclic peptide antibiotics

Antibiotic resistant bacterial infections are now a leading cause of global mortality. While drug resistance continues to spread, the clinical antibiotic pipeline has become bare. This discord has focused attention on developing new strategies for antimicrobial discovery. Natural macrocyclic peptide-based products have provided novel antibiotics and antibiotic scaffolds targeting several essential bacterial cell envelope processes, but discovery of such natural products remains a slow and inefficient process. Synthetic strategies employing peptide display technologies can quickly screen large libraries of macrocyclic sequences for specific target binding and general antibacterial potential providing alternative approaches for new antibiotic discovery. Here we review cell envelope processes that can be targeted with macrocyclic peptide therapeutics, outline important macrocyclic peptide display technologies, and discuss future strategies for both library design and screening.     

Combinatorial synthesis of natural products

Combinatorial syntheses allow production of compound libraries in an expeditious and organized manner immediately applicable for high-throughput screening. Natural products possess a pedigree to justify quality and appreciation in drug discovery and development. Currently, we are seeing a rapid increase in application of natural products in combinatorial chemistry and vice versa. The therapeutic areas of infectious disease and oncology still dominate but many new areas are emerging. Several complex natural products have now been synthesised by solid-phase methods and have created the foundation for preparation of combinatorial libraries. In other examples, natural products or intermediates have served as building blocks or scaffolds in the synthesis of complex natural products, bioactive analogues or designed hybrid molecules. Finally, structural motifs from the biologically active parent molecule have been identified and have served for design of natural product mimicry, which facilitates the creation of combinatorial libraries.     

Microbial genomics for the improvement of natural product discovery

The quest for the discovery of novel natural products has entered a new chapter with the enormous wealth of genetic data that is now available. This information has been exploited by using whole-genome sequence mining to uncover cryptic pathways, or biosynthetic pathways for previously undetected metabolites. Alternatively, using known paradigms for secondary metabolite biosynthesis, genetic information has been 'fished out' of DNA libraries resulting in the discovery of new natural products and isolation of gene clusters for known metabolites. Novel natural products have been discovered by expressing genetic data from uncultured organisms or difficult-to-manipulate strains in heterologous hosts. Furthermore, improvements in heterologous expression have not only helped to identify gene clusters but have also made it easier to manipulate these genes in order to generate new compounds. Finally, and perhaps the most crucial aspect of the efficient and prosperous use of the abundance of genetic information, novel enzyme chemistry continues to be discovered, which has aided our understanding of how natural products are biosynthesized de novo, and enabled us to rework the current paradigms for natural product biosynthesis.     

Systematics-guided bioprospecting for bioactive microbial natural products

Advances in the taxonomic characterization of microorganisms have accelerated the rate at which new producers of natural products can be understood in relation to known organisms. Yet for many reasons, chemical efforts to characterize new compounds from new microbes have not kept pace with taxonomic advances. That there exists an ever-widening gap between the biological versus chemical characterization of new microorganisms creates tremendous opportunity for the discovery of novel natural products through the calculated selection and study of organisms from unique, untapped, ecological niches. A systematics-guided bioprospecting, including the construction of high quality libraries of marine microbes and their crude extracts, investigation of bioactive compounds, and increasing the active compounds by precision engineering, has become an efficient approach to drive drug leads discovery. This review outlines the recent advances in these issues and shares our experiences on anti-infectious drug discovery and improvement of avermectins production as well.     

Marcel Faber Roundtable: Is our antibiotic pipeline unproductive because of starvation, constipation or lack of inspiration?

There are few new antibiotics in the pipeline today. The reasons may include starvation at the front of the pipeline due to inadequate sources of suitable compounds to screen coupled with poorly validated discovery methodologies. A successful antibiotic discovery approach in the past, based upon whole cell antibiotic screening of natural products from actinomycetes and fungi, eventually suffered from constipation in the middle of the pipeline due to rediscovery of known compounds, even though low throughput methodology was employed at the front end. The current lack of productivity may be attributed to the poor choice of strategies to address the discovery of new antibiotics. Recent applications of high throughput in vitro screening of individual antibacterial targets to identify lead compounds from combinatorial chemical libraries, traditional chemical libraries, and partially purified natural product extracts has not produced any significant clinical candidates. The solution to the current dilemma may be to return to natural product whole cell screening. For this approach to work in the current millennium, the process needs to be miniaturized to increase the throughput by orders of magnitude over traditional screening, and the rediscovery of known antibiotics needs to be minimized by methods that can be readily monitored and improved over time.     

人工合成多样性突变文库研究进展*

突变文库的构建是定向进化研究过程中一个关键步骤,主要利用天然存在的系统或者人工合成的分子技术来产生多样性核酸分子文库,为制备和筛选具有一定特性的蛋白酶、多肽、人工抗体等提供庞大的遗传基因库,也可用于合成生物学中相关基因元件的研究与筛选,为目标生物制品的高效工业化生产提供动力。随着对突变文库构建技术研究的日益深入,各种文库构建策略相继被开发出来,并在生物能源、生物化工、生物医药、生物试剂和食品工业等方面得到了广泛的应用。然而,定向进化中的文库构建策略多有不同,各种突变文库构建技术的核心方法也在不断创新。主要介绍近年来实验室中人工合成多样性文库的前沿技术,并对文库构建技术在自动化和智能化方向的发展进行了展望。     

Discovery of New Compounds Active against Plasmodium falciparum by High Throughput Screening of Microbial Natural Products

Due to the low structural diversity within the set of antimalarial drugs currently available in the clinic and the increasing number of cases of resistance, there is an urgent need to find new compounds with novel modes of action to treat the disease. Microbial natural products are characterized by their large diversity provided in terms of the chemical complexity of the compounds and the novelty of structures. Microbial natural products extracts have been underexplored in the search for new antiparasitic drugs and even more so in the discovery of new antimalarials. Our objective was to find new druggable natural products with antimalarial properties from the MEDINA natural products collection, one of the largest natural product libraries harboring more than 130,000 microbial extracts. In this work, we describe the optimization process and the results of a phenotypic high throughput screen (HTS) based on measurements of Plasmodium lactate dehydrogenase. A subset of more than 20,000 extracts from the MEDINA microbial products collection has been explored, leading to the discovery of 3 new compounds with antimalarial activity. In addition, we report on the novel antiplasmodial activity of 4 previously described natural products.     

Design of compound libraries based on natural product scaffolds and protein structure similarity clustering (PSSC)

Recent advances in structural biology, bioinformatics and combinatorial chemistry have significantly impacted the discovery of small molecules that modulate protein functions. Natural products which have evolved to bind to proteins may serve as biologically validated starting points for the design of focused libraries that might provide protein ligands with enhanced quality and probability. The combined application of natural product derived scaffolds with a new approach that clusters proteins according to structural similarity of their ligand sensing cores provides a new principle for the design and synthesis of such libraries. This article discusses recent advances in the synthesis of natural product inspired compound collections and the application of protein structure similarity clustering for the development of such libraries.     

Natural products as a screening resource

Natural products have been the most productive source of leads for new drugs, but they are currently out of fashion with the pharmaceutical industry. New approaches to sourcing novel compounds from untapped areas of biodiversity coupled with the technical advances in analytical techniques (such as microcoil NMR and linked LC-MS-NMR) have removed many of the difficulties in using natural products in screening campaigns. As the 'chemical space' occupied by natural products is both more varied and more drug-like than that of combinatorial chemical collections, synthetic and biosynthetic methods are being developed to produce screening libraries of natural product-like compounds. A renaissance of drug discovery inspired by natural products can be predicted.     

γ-Pyrone natural products—A privileged compound class provided by nature

In “Biology Oriented Synthesis” (BIOS), the inherent biological relevance of natural products is employed for the design and synthesis of compound libraries. Towards this end, library generation in BIOS is focused on compound classes from biologically relevant space such as the natural product space or also the drug space and only scaffolds of these areas of proven relevance are employed for synthesis of small focused libraries with limited diversity. We here present a short overview of γ-pyrone natural products, highlighting their biological properties and their potential applicability in a BIOS of a compound library.     

Introduction of New Tools for Chemical Biology Research on Microbial Metabolites

Recently, high-throughput screening (HTS) has become the mainstream technique for drug discovery. Compounds that are synthesized by combinatorial chemistry might be more suitable than natural products to apply to HTS, because the purification procedure is a drawback of using natural products. Nevertheless, natural products remain an extremely important source of drugs. To overcome the demerits of natural products, we are constructing the RIKEN Natural Products Depository (NPDepo) that is focused primarily on microbial metabolites. In this review, I describe (i) engineering pathways for biosynthetic gene clusters of microbial metabolites, (ii) construction of fraction libraries of microbial metabolites, and (iii) the development of a new screening system using a chemical array and a protein library produced by GLORIA.     

Capturing Nature's Diversity

Natural products are universally recognized to contribute valuable chemical diversity to the design of molecular screening libraries. The analysis undertaken in this work, provides a foundation for the generation of fragment screening libraries that capture the diverse range of molecular recognition building blocks embedded within natural products. Physicochemical properties were used to select fragment-sized natural products from a database of known natural products (Dictionary of Natural Products). PCA analysis was used to illustrate the positioning of the fragment subset within the property space of the non-fragment sized natural products in the dataset. Structural diversity was analysed by three distinct methods: atom function analysis, using pharmacophore fingerprints, atom type analysis, using radial fingerprints, and scaffold analysis. Small pharmacophore triplets, representing the range of chemical features present in natural products that are capable of engaging in molecular interactions with small, contiguous areas of protein binding surfaces, were analysed. We demonstrate that fragment-sized natural products capture more than half of the small pharmacophore triplet diversity observed in non fragment-sized natural product datasets. Atom type analysis using radial fingerprints was represented by a self-organizing map. We examined the structural diversity of non-flat fragment-sized natural product scaffolds, rich in sp3 configured centres. From these results we demonstrate that 2-ring fragment-sized natural products effectively balance the opposing characteristics of minimal complexity and broad structural diversity when compared to the larger, more complex fragment-like natural products. These naturally-derived fragments could be used as the starting point for the generation of a highly diverse library with the scope for further medicinal chemistry elaboration due to their minimal structural complexity. This study highlights the possibility to capture a high proportion of the individual molecular interaction motifs embedded within natural products using a fragment screening library spanning 422 structural clusters and comprised of approximately 2800 natural products.     

Diversifying microbial natural products for drug discovery

Historically, nature has provided the source for the majority of the drugs in use today. More than 20,000 microbial secondary metabolites have been described, but only a small percentage of these have been carried forward as natural product drugs. Natural products are in tough competition with large chemical libraries and with combinatorial chemistries. Hence, each step of a natural product program has to be more efficient than ever, starting from the collection of environmental samples and the selection of strains, to metabolic expression, genetic exploitation, sample preparation and chemical dereplication. This review will focus on approaches for diversifying microbial natural product strains and extract libraries, while decreasing genetic and chemical redundancy.V. Knight and J.-J. Sanglier contributed equally to this work     

Bioprospecting microbial metagenome for natural products

Mining of natural sources for new secondary metabolites has a successful history, which is reflected by the fact that over 50% of all drugs, currently on the market, are derived from natural products. Bacteria are one of the most important sources of bioactive natural products destined for drug discovery. However, less than 1% of the microorganisms observed in different habitats have been cultivated and characterized. To explore the genomic and functional diversity of the vast majority of the microbial world, novel methods were introduced, which are based on analysis of a DNA isolated from environmental communities. Metagenomics represents a strategy offering access to the genetic information present in uncultured bacteria by screening of libraries constructed from DNA isolated from different habitats. Functional- and sequence-driven screens are the major approaches employed to mine metagenomic libraries. This review aims to highlight discoveries in this area and discusses the possible future directions of the field.     

A road less traveled by: exploring a decade of Ellman chemistry

The Ellman group has been one of the most influential in the development and widespread adoption of combinatorial chemistry techniques for biomedical research. Their work has included substantial methodological development for library synthesis with a particular focus on new scaffolds rationally targeted to biomolecules of interest and biologically relevant natural products. Herein we analyze a representative set of libraries from this group with respect to their biological and biomedical relevance in comparison to existing drugs and probe compounds. This analysis reveals that the Ellman group has not only provided new methodologies to the community but also provided libraries with unique potential for further biological study.     

Active TEM-1 beta-lactamase mutants with random peptides inserted in three contiguous surface loops

Engineering of alternative binding sites on the surface of an enzyme while preserving the enzymatic activity would offer new opportunities for controlling the activity by binding of non-natural ligands. Loops and turns are the natural substructures in which binding sites might be engineered with this purpose. We have genetically inserted random peptide sequences into three relatively rigid and contiguous loops of the TEM-1 beta-lactamase and assessed the tolerance to insertion by the percentage of active mutants. Our results indicate that tolerance to insertion could not be correlated to tolerance to mutagenesis. A turn between two beta-strands bordering the active site was observed to be tolerant to random mutagenesis but not to insertions. Two rigid loops comprising rather well-conserved amino acid residues tolerated insertions, although with some constraints. Insertions between the N-terminal helix and the first beta-strand generated active libraries if cysteine residues were included at both ends of the insert, suggesting the requirement for a stabilizing disulfide bridge. Random sequences were relatively well accommodated within the loop connecting the final beta-strand to the C-terminal helix, particularly if the wild-type residue was retained at one of the loops' end. This suggests two strategies for increasing the percentage of active mutants in insertion libraries. The amino acid distribution in the engineered loops was analyzed and found to be less biased against hydrophobic residues than in natural medium-sized loops. The combination of these activity-selected libraries generated a huge library containing active hybrid enzymes with all three loops modified.