Distamycin A

G-quadruplex ligands are potential anticancer agents as telomerase inhibitors and potential transcriptional regulators of oncogenes. The search for best-in-class drugs is addressed to identify small molecules able to promote and stabilize G-quadruplex structures. What features should the G-quadruplex ligands possess? They should have selective antiproliferative effects on cancer cells and induce telomerase inhibition or oncogene suppression. One of the main challenges in their design and synthesis is to make the ligands selective for G-quadruplex DNA. These features should be amplified by careful analyses of physico-chemical aspects of G-quadruplex-drug interactions. In particular, the study of the energetics of G-quadruplex-drug interactions can enhance drug design by providing thermodynamic parameters that give quantitative information on the biomolecular interactions important for binding. The main methodologies used to gain information on energetics of binding are based on spectroscopic or calorimetric principles.

Design and synthesis of nucleoside analogues have persistently attracted extensive interest because of their potential application in the field of antiviral therapy, and its study also receives additional impetus for improvement in the ProTide technology. Previous studies have made great strides in the design and discovery of monophosphorylated nucleoside analogues as potential kinase-independent antiretrovirals. In this work, a series of nucleoside phosphoramidates modified by distamycin analogues was synthesized and evaluated as nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs) in HIV-1-infected MT-4 and CEM cells, including variations in nucleoside, alkyl moiety, and the structure of distamycin analogues. These compounds exhibited modest potency with the EC50 value in the range of 1.3- to 6.5-fold lower than their corresponding parent drugs in MT-4 cells, which may be attributed to increasing intracellular availability due to the existence of distamycin analogue with favorable hydrophilic-lipophilic equilibrium.

In biosynthesis of natural products, potential intermediates or analogs of a particular compound in the crude extracts are commonly overlooked in routine assays due to their low concentration, limited structural information, or because of their insignificant bio-activities. This may lead into an incomplete and even an incorrect biosynthetic pathway for the target molecule. Here we applied multiple compound mining approaches, including genome scanning and precursor ion scan-directed mass spectrometry, to identify potential pyrrolamide compounds in the fermentation culture of Streptomyces netropsis. Several novel congocidine and distamycin analogs were thus detected and characterized. A more reasonable route for the biosynthesis of pyrrolamides was proposed based on the structures of these newly discovered compounds, as well as the functional characterization of several key biosynthetic genes of pyrrolamides. Collectively, our results implied an unusual "iterative strategy" underlying the pyrrole polymerization in the biosynthesis of pyrrolamide antibiotics.

The pyrrolamides constitute a small family of secondary metabolites that are known for their ability to bind noncovalently to the DNA minor groove with some sequence specificity. To date, only a single pyrrolamide biosynthetic gene cluster has been reported, directing the synthesis of congocidine (netropsin) in Streptomyces ambofaciens. In this study, we improve our understanding of pyrrolamide biosynthesis through the identification and characterization of the gene cluster responsible for the production of distamycin in Streptomyces netropsis DSM40846. We discover that the strain produces two other pyrrolamides, the well-characterized congocidine and a congocidine/distamycin hybrid that we named disgocidine. S. netropsis DSM40846 genome analysis led to the identification of two distinct pyrrolamide-like biosynthetic gene clusters. We show here that these two clusters are reciprocally dependent for the production of the three pyrrolamide molecules.