Collaborative biosynthesis

Trisporic acid is the sex hormone of the fungi of the order Mucorales, It is not produced by unmated cells of the two mating types, but when (+) and (-) cells are close enough so that metabolites can diffuse between them they initiate a collaborative biosynthesis of trisporic acid, which diffuses into the medium. It affects the differentiation and isoprenoid biosynthesis of recipient cells. 

The broad outlines of this collaborative biosynthesis via mating-type specific precursors ( prohorraones ) now seem clear. 

Fig, 3. Proposed metabolic grid scheme for the collaborative biosynthesis of trisporic acid showing mating-type specific reactions. 

Increased GM3 content was also observed in another strain of HeLa exposed to butyrate but not in butyrate-treated normal human fibroblasts (experiments in collaboration with E. Stanbridge, University of California at Irvine and R. 0. Brady, NINCDS). Butyrate appeared to have similar effects on GM3 biosynthesis in KB cells, another human carcinoma-derived cell line (20). Butyrate-treated KB cells had 9-fold elevated levels of sialyl transferase activity. In contrast, butyrate as well as dibutyryl-... 

The biosynthesis of Fe/S clusters may well proceed via other, possibly more simple Fe/S clusters as intermediates. The products of the genes riifS and nif U in Azotobacter vinelandii are thought to collaborate in nitrogenase metal-locluster biosynthesis NIFS is a sulfide donor NIFU is a [2Fe-2S] protein. The... 

David Morgan is a member of the Chemical Ecology Group at Keele University. He was bom in Newfoundland and had his university education there, at Dalhousie University and University of King s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and at Oxford. His doctorate thesis was on the lipids of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. He later worked at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, and for Shell Chemical Company and Shell Research under the direction of Sir Robert Robinson, O.M., Nobel Laureate. From 1966 he has been at Keele in Staffordshire as lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, and professor. He discovered the natural pesticide azadirachtin and collaborated with S. V. Ley for its final structure elucidation. He is the author of over 300 papers and reviews, mostly on insect chemistry, editor, and contributor to several volumes and author of the book Biosynthesis in Insects. ... 

The total synthesis was achieved in 1954 by Woodward and his collaborators (156). Before this, various unsuccessful attempts had been made to make a start toward a synthesis of strychnine (179, 180, 181, 182,) but these are now of little interest, with the exception of Robinson s idea (182) to emulate the postulated biosynthesis by attempting to synthesize the dialdehyde CCXVI, which then might be induced to cyclize by a combination of Mannich and aldol type condensations to the Wieland-Gumlich aldehyde (LV) the synthesis of CCXVI unfortunately was not realized. Much more recently, however, this idea has been used by van Tamelen et al. (184), who successfully synthesized the dialdehyde CCXVII and converted it in aqueous acetic acid-sodium... 

Using carbon-13 magnetic resonance spectroscopy, Rinehart and his collaborators have shown49 that the biosynthesis of the streptovaricins is very similar to that of the rifamycins. Streptovaricin D is synthesized from a C7N unit of unknown origin to which 8 propionic acid residues and two acetic acid residues are attached, whereby the direction of growth is the same as that of the rifamycins. In contrast to the... 

Burstein and Hunter (1995) observed that THC stimulated the biosynthesis of anandamide in neuroblastoma cells employing either ethanolamine or arachidonic acid as the label. Anandamide bios5mthesis has also been shown to occur in primary cultures of rat brain neurons labelled with [H]-ethanolamine when stimulated with ionomycin, a Ca ionophore (Di Marzo et al. 1994). These authors proposed an alternate model for the biosynthesis of anandamide in which N-arachidonoyl phosphatidyl ethanolamine is cleaved by a phospholipase D activity to yield phosphatidic acid and ararchidonoylethanolamide. This model is based upon extensive studies undertaken by Schmid and collaborators (1990), who have shown that fatty acid ethanolamide formation results from the N-acylation of phosphatidyl ethanolamine by a transacylase to form N-acyl phosphatidylethanolamine. Possibly resulting from postmortem changes, this compound is subsequently hydrolyzed to the fatty acid ethanolamide and the corresponding phosphatide by a phosphodiesterase, phospholipase D. 

Scheme 18 illustrates the proposed stages in 6-MSA biosynthesis in which the first and second condensation steps proceed with inversion to give the triketide (63). Ketoreduction gives the alcohol (64) and then elimination followed by a final malonyl condensation generates the tetraketide (65) which cyclises via an intramolecular condensation and enolises to give the aromatic nucleus of (66). In the first set of experiments (J )- and (S)-[l- C, H]nialonales were incubated separately with 6-MSA synthase purified from Penicillium patulum [56]. Isotope incorporations were determined by mass spectrometry. All the possible isotope patterns for retention or loss of the pro-J or pro-S hydrogens from C-3 and C-5 were permutated. Comparison with the actual spectra obtained demonstrated that opposite prochiral hydrogens were eliminated. The absolute stereochemistry was established in an analogous experiment [57] where the chiral malonates were incubated with acetoacetyl CoA rather than acetyl CoA. Subsequent mass spectral analysis showed that it is the Hr proton that is retained at C-3 of 6-MSA and so it can be deduced that the hydrogen at C-5 must be derived from the opposite prochiral hydrogen, Hg. The overall result is summarised in Scheme 18. In a recent collaborative study we have synthesised the triketide alcohol (64) as its NAC thioester and shown that it is indeed a precursor as, on incubation with 6-MSA synthase and malonyl CoA, 6-MSA production is observed [unpublished results]. Current work is aimed at synthesis of both enantiomers of (64) to study the overall stereochemistry of the ketoreduction and elimination reactions.

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