As part of our long-standing program evaluating the biosynthetic complexity and biomedical potential of natural products from marine microbes, our attention was drawn to culture extracts from a Verruc...

Flow cytometry has great potential for screening in translational research areas due to its deep quantification of cellular features, ability to colle…

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Podcast Episode · Quantum Potential · 02/27/2025 · 48m

Microbial secondary metabolites are compounds produced by bacteria and fungi that are not required for their replication and unconditional survival (1, 2). While they are thus not expected to be unive...

YouTube video by UW-Madison Department of Biochemistry

Tambjamines are complex bipyrrole-containing natural products that possess promising bioactive properties. Although Pseudoalteromonas citrea is known to produce both cyclic tambjamine MYP1 and the linear precursor (YP1), the biosynthetic machinery used to catalyze the site-selective oxidative carbocyclization at the unactivated 1° carbon of YP1 has remained unclear. Here, we demonstrate that a three-component Rieske system consisting of an oxygenase (TamC) and two redox partner proteins is responsible for this unprecedented activity on YP1 and potentially, a non-native substrate (BE-18591). We also show that a homologous oxidase from Pseudoalteromonas tunicata (PtTamC) can function together with the partner proteins from P. citrea to process both YP1 and BE-18591. These reactions represent the first Rieske oxygenase-catalyzed activations of C–H bonds at 1° carbons, resulting in carbon–carbon bond formation. The use of TamC and PtTamC to potentially generate the new-to-nature cyclic analogue of BE-18591 suggests the enormous biocatalytic potential of these Rieske systems to facilitate late-stage oxidative cyclizations at terminal C(sp3)–H bonds.

A halogenase enzyme uses the copper in its active site to catalyse iterative chlorinations on multiple unactivated carbon−hydrogen bonds, enabling carbon−hydrogen functionalization that is not achieva...

Xylindein is a blue-green pigment produced by the fungi Chlorociboria aeruginascens and Chlorociboria aeruginosa. Its stunning color and optoelectronic properties make xylindein valuable for textiles ...

The Human Microbiome Compendium is a unified database of publicly available human gut microbiome 16S samples, built with the integrated data from hundreds of independent projects. The compendium is us...

Nature Reviews Microbiology - In this Review, Dinglasan and colleagues explore innovations that facilitate rapid microbial secondary metabolite discovery, focusing on recent techniques for the...

The transmission of antibiotic-resistance genes, comprising mobilization and relocation events, orchestrates the dissemination of antimicrobial resistance. Inspired by this evolutionarily successful p...