Affiliation:
1. Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, 354 McCourtney Hall, University of Note Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46656–5670, USA
Abstract
The title of this essay is as much a question as it is a statement. The discovery of the β-lactam antibiotics—including penicillins, cephalosporins, and carbapenems—as largely (if not exclusively) secondary metabolites of terrestrial fungi and bacteria, transformed modern medicine. The antibiotic β-lactams inactivate essential enzymes of bacterial cell-wall biosynthesis. Moreover, the ability of the β-lactams to function as enzyme inhibitors is of such great medical value, that inhibitors of the enzymes which degrade hydrolytically the β-lactams, the β-lactamases, have equal value. Given this privileged status for the β-lactam ring, it is therefore a disappointment that the exemplification of this ring in marine secondary metabolites is sparse. It may be that biologically active marine β-lactams are there, and simply have yet to be encountered. In this report, we posit a second explanation: that the value of the β-lactam to secure an ecological advantage in the marine environment might be compromised by its close structural similarity to the β-lactones of quorum sensing. The steric and reactivity similarities between the β-lactams and the β-lactones represent an outside-of-the-box opportunity for correlating new structures and new enzyme targets for the discovery of compelling biological activities.
Funder
National Institutes of Health
Subject
Drug Discovery,Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics (miscellaneous),Pharmaceutical Science
Cited by
8 articles.
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