Antibiotic resistance in bacterial pathogens is becoming increasingly common and so there is a need for the development of new antibiotics, which act in novel ways, to counter-act this. In this review, featuring in MedChemComm‘s Natural Products themed issue, Yun Xuan Tan and Floyd E. Romesberg (The Scripps Research Institute) review the arylomycins, the recently discovered class of natural product antibiotics that inhibit bacterial type I signal peptidase (SPase), an endoprotease that is required for the translocation of most proteins across the cytoplasmic membrane.
Tan and Romesberg assess how the total synthesis of several members of this family of natural products has allowed studies which show that their spectrum of activity is broader than previously thought. The discussion goes on to how the arylomycins may represent “latent” antibiotics, antibiotics that have scaffolds that once had potent and broard-spectrum activity, and how these are more likely to be optimised to regain this activity than other scaffolds that have never been antibiotics.
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Latent antibiotics and the potential of the arylomycins for broad-spectrum antibacterial activity
Yun Xuan Tan and Floyd E. Romesberg
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, DOI: 10.1039/C2MD20043K
