ELUCIDATION OF PATHWAYS FOR ANTIBIOTIC BIOSYNTHESIS IN STREPTOMYCES COELICOLOR A3(2)

摘要

Natural sources have proved to be invaluable pools for the discovery of clinically-useful compounds for more than 50 years and represent over two thirds of new antibiotics approved for clinical use in the last 25 years. A wide variety of these naturally-derived compounds are produced by the bacterial genus Streptomyces and related actinobacteria, which are well known for their ability to produce a large number of structurally diverse secondary metabolites. Streptomyces species have been extensively studied in an attempt to understand the biosynthetic processes involved in the formation of these secondary metabolites. This knowledge has already been applied in numerous cases to produce analogues of compounds with promising pharmaceutical properties by combinatorial biosynthesis or mutasynthesis approaches.