Escherichia coli allows efficient modular incorporation of newly isolated quinomycin biosynthetic enzyme into echinomycin biosynthetic pathway for rational design and synthesis of potent antibiotic unnatural natural product.

Natural products display impressive activities against a wide range of targets, including viruses, microbes, and tumors. However, their clinical use is hampered frequently by their scarcity and undesirable toxicity. Not only can engineering Escherichia coli for plasmid-based pharmacophore biosynthesis offer alternative means of simple and easily scalable production of valuable yet hard-to-obtain compounds, but also carries a potential for providing a straightforward and efficient means of preparing natural product analogs. The quinomycin family of nonribosomal peptides, including echinomycin, triostin A, and SW-163s, are important secondary metabolites imparting antibiotic antitumor activity via DNA bisintercalation. Previously we have shown the production of echinomycin and triostin A in E. coli using our convenient and modular plasmid system to introduce these heterologous biosynthetic pathways into E. coli. However, we have yet to develop a novel biosynthetic pathway capable of producing bioactive unnatural natural products in E. coli. Here we report an identification of a new gene cluster responsible for the biosynthesis of SW-163s that involves previously unknown biosynthesis of (+)-(1S, 2S)-norcoronamic acid and generation of aliphatic side chains of various sizes via iterative methylation of an unactivated carbon center. Substituting an echinomycin biosynthetic gene with a gene from the newly identified SW-163 biosynthetic gene cluster, we were able to rationally re-engineer the plasmid-based echinomycin biosynthetic pathway for the production of a novel bioactive compound in E. coli.

Relative and absolute configuration of antitumor agent SW-163D.

Our interest on engineering non-ribosomal synthetase responsible for SW-163 biosynthesis prompted us to determine the relative and absolute configuration of antitumor cyclic depsipeptide SW-163s. We first isolated and identified SW-163 homologs D, F and G as known compounds UK-63598, UK-65662 and UK-63052, respectively. Both enantiomers of the unusual constitutive amino acid, N-methylnorcoromic acid, were synthesized in chiral forms starting from (R)- and (S)-1,2-propanediol. The hydrolyzate of SW-163D, a major constituent of this family, was converted with Marfey's reagent, 1-fluoro-2,4-dinitrophenyl-5-L-alanine-amide (L-FDAA), and the resulting mixture of amino acid derivatives was subjected to an LC/MS analysis. Compared with authentic samples, the analytical data unambiguously show that SW-163D consisted of L-Ala, D-Ser and (1S, 2S)-N-methylnorcoronamic acid. The remaining stereochemistry of the N-methylcysteine moieties was determined from NOE data.