University of St Andrews
Allomerus ants ensure that they have sufficient nitrogen in their diet by trapping and consuming other insects. In order to construct their traps, like the more extensively studied leaf cutter ants, they employ fungal farming. Pest management within these fungal cultures has been speculated to be due to the ants’ usage of actinomycetes capable of producing … Read more
A new family of radical halogenases has been discovered that regio- and stereoselectively chlorinates the unactivated carbon center of indolemonoterpenoid substrates without the prerequisite for the substrate to be bound to a protein carrier. Goss RJM, Grüschow S Nature Chemical Biology 2014, 10, 878
Smith DRM; Grüschow S; Goss RJM Curr Opin Chem Biol 2012, 17 (2) 276-283 A large and diverse series of halogenated natural products exist. In many of these compounds the halogen is important to biological activity and bioavailability. We now recognise that nature has developed many different halogenation strategies for which well-known enzyme classes such as haem … Read more
Amany E. Ragab ; Sabine Grüschow ; Daniel R. Tromans ; Rebecca J. M. Goss JACS 2011, 133 (39) 15288-15291 The pacidamycins belong to a class of antimicrobial nucleoside antibiotics that act by inhibiting the clinically unexploited target translocase I, a key enzyme in peptidoglycan assembly. As with other nucleoside antibiotics, the pacidamycin 4′,5′-dehydronucleoside portion is … Read more
Sabine Grüschow ; Emma J. Rackham ; Rebecca J. M. Goss Chem Sci 2011, 2 2182-2186 As with many other antibiotics, pacidamycins are produced as a suite of related compounds. Unlike most other secondary metabolites, however, this diversity is not solely the result of the substrate promiscuity of the biosynthetic enzymes but also arises from a gene duplication event (Pac21, … Read more
Abhijeet Deb Roy ; Sabine Grueschow ; Nickiwe Cairns ; Rebecca J. M. Goss JACS 2010, 132 (35) 12243-12245 Introduction of prnA, the halogenase gene from pyrrolnitrin biosynthesis, into Streptomyces coeruleorubidus resulted in efficient in situ chlorination of the uridyl peptide antibotic pacidamycin. The installed chlorine provided a selectably functionalizable handle enabling synthetic modification of the natural product using mild cross-coupling … Read more
Joerg Barke ; Ryan F. Seipke ; Sabine Grueschow ; Darren Heavens ; Nizar Drou ; Mervyn J. Bibb ; Rebecca J. M. Goss ; Douglas W. Yu ; Matthew I. Hutchings BMC Biology 2010, 8 109 ttine ants live in an intensely studied tripartite mutualism with the fungus Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, which provides food to the ants, and … Read more
Emma J. Rackham ; Sabine Grüschow ; Amany E. Ragab ; Shilo Dickens ; Rebecca J. M. Goss ChemBioChem 2010, 11 (12) 1700-1709 The pacidamycins are antimicrobial nucleoside antibiotics produced by Streptomyces coeruleorubidus that inhibit translocase I, an essential bacterial enzyme yet to be clinically targeted. The novel pacidamycin scaffold is composed of a pseudopeptide backbone linked by … Read more
Amany E. Ragab ; Sabine Grüschow ; Emma J. Rackham ; Rebecca J. M. Goss Org Biomol Chem 2010, 8 3128-3129 Feeding phenylalanine analogues to Streptomyces coeruleorubidus reveals the remarkable steric and electronic flexibility of this biosynthetic pathway and leads to the generation of a series of new halopacidamycins.
Sabine Gruschow ; Emma J. Rackham ; Benjamin Elkins ; Philip L. A. Newilll ; Lionel M. Hill ; Rebecca J. M. Goss ChemBioChem 2009, 10 (2) 355-360 Pacidamycins, mureidomycins and napsamycins are structurally related uridyl peptide antibiotics that inhibit translocase I, an as yet clinically unexploited target. This potentially important bioactivity coupled to the biosynthetically intriguing … Read more