Ikarugamycin

Nature provides an inexhaustible diversity of small organic molecules with beautiful molecular architectures that have strong and selective inhibitory activities. However, this tremendous biomedical potential often remains inaccessible, as the structural complexity of natural products can render their synthetic preparation extremely challenging. This problem is addressable by harnessing the biocatalytic procedures evolved by nature. In this work, we present an enzymatic total synthesis of ikarugamycin. The use of an iterative PKS/NRPS machinery and two reductases has allowed the construction of 15 carbon-carbon and 2 carbon-nitrogen bonds in a biocatalytic one-pot reaction. By scaling-up this method we demonstrate the applicability of biocatalytic approaches for the ex vivo synthesis of complex natural products.

Polycyclic tetramate macrolactams (PTMs) are a family of biomedically promising natural products with challenging molecular frameworks. Despite these interesting properties, so far only relatively little is known about the biosynthetic origin of PTMs, in particular concerning the mechanism by which their ring systems are formed. Herein we present the first insights into these processes by using the biosynthesis of ikarugamycin as an example. This has been facilitated by the first heterologous expression of a PTM biosynthetic gene cluster in Escherichia coli. With this approach it will not only become possible to mechanistically investigate already known PTM biosynthetic pathways in more detail in the future, but also to interrogate cryptic PTM biosynthetic pathways chemically and biochemically.

Ikarugamycin (IK) is an antibiotic which has been reported to have a variety of functions, such as inhibition of clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME), anti-tumor effects and regulation of the immune system. Whether IK influences cytokine production is poorly understood. We have investigated the relationship between IK and production of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF). TNF plays a pivotal role in pathogenesis of many diseases. Although the dynamics of soluble TNF (sTNF) has been widely explored so far, the functions of the membrane form of TNF (mTNF) have not been fully elucidated. We demonstrated that IK increases the amount of mTNF and prolongs the duration of TNF expression. This effect is unrelated to the shedding activity of disintegrin and metalloproteinase domain-containing protein 17 (ADAM 17). Our results revealed that there is a mechanism to terminate inflammation at the cellular level which IK dysregulates. Furthermore, IK can be a tool to study TNF signaling due to its effect of increasing mTNF expression.