Cladosporin Derivatives Obtained by Biotransformation Provide Guidance for the Focused Derivatization of this Antimalarial Lead Compound.

Cladosporin, a natural product known for decades, has recently been discovered to display potent and selective antiplasmodial activity by inhibition of lysyl-tRNA synthetase. It was subjected to a panel of oxidative biotransformations with one fungal and two actinomycetes strains, as well as a triple mutant bacterial CYP102A1, yielding eight, mostly hydroxylated, derivatives. These new compounds covered a wide chemical space and contained two pairs of epimers in the tetrahydropyran ring. Although less potent than the parent compound, all analogues showed activity in a cell-based synthetase assay, thus demonstrating uptake and on-target activity in living cells with varying degrees of selectivity for the enzyme lysyl-tRNA synthetase from Plasmodium falciparum and highlighting sites suitable for synthesis of future cladosporin analogues. Compounds with adjacent hydroxy functions showed different MS/MS fragmentation that can be explained in terms of an, in some cases, regioselective loss of water followed by a retro-Diels-Alder reaction.

Automated chiral method screening - Evaluation of generated chromatographic data sets to further optimize screening efficiency.

We set up an automated screening process to routinely test 10 chiral supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) methods - five columns combined with two co-solvents - as part of a chiral separation lab workflow. Proprietary software tools enabled automated method screening of racemates, parallel evaluation of the resulting chromatograms for enantiomer separation and report generation. This process is largely automated and resulted in an efficient and reliable lab process with a minimum requirement for human intervention. Screenings were conducted on a test set of 756 racemates that were selected with focus on structural variation and on 2667 proprietary samples from lab routines. Statistical analysis revealed that up to 92% of the tested racemic mixtures could be successfully separated with at least one of the tested conditions of the screening. Process efficiency was further increased by identification of optimal method screening sequence, re-definition of the optimal column set and project-specific adaptations considering reduced structural variation of the analytes. This study illustrates the usefulness of consistent chromatographic data sets to accelerate and facilitate the identification of chiral methods to separate enantiomers by automated processing and statistical analysis.