Combinatorial synthesis structural diversity from

In the absence of any information about the structure of a target, combinatorial synthesis can be used to explore a set of diverse scaffolds that direct potential binding interactions to different angles and distances from each other. The structure-activity relationship that emerges from... 

Combinatorial chemistry is both the philosophical and the practical method with which to create structurally diverse compound libraries. Combinatorial chemistry is defined as that branch of synthetic organic chemistry that enables the concomitant synthesis of large numbers of chemical variants in such a manner as to permit their evaluation, isolation, and identification. Combinatorial chemistry affords techniques for the systematic creation of large but structurally diverse libraries. From a technical perspective, there are several avenues of approach to library creation ... 

The advent of combinatorial techniques and solid phase organic synthesis may lead to preparation of large numbers of structurally related molecules in short periods of time. This is important especially for the optimization of lead structures in the pharmaceutical industry [40]. It is now well established and documented that the combinatorial technology and solid phase techniques could offer sufficient latitude for preparation of corresponding chemical libraries with broad structural diversity. The diverse potentiality of (3-lactam moiety as specific pharmacophores and scaffolds has attracted ample interests from pharmaceutical industries for the synthetic methods based on polymer-supported techniques. 

Modular PKS enzymes are responsible for the synthesis of a wide diversity of structures and seem to have more relaxed specificities in several of the enzymatic steps. Their enormous appeal for combinatorial purposes, though, derives from the presence of multiple modules that can be manipulated independently, allowing the production of rings of different sizes and with potential stereochemical variation at each PK carbon. The higher complexity of these pathways has somewhat hindered their exploitation, but recently, several have been fully characterized. Among them, by far the most studied modular multienzyme complex is 6-deoxyerythronolide B synthase (DEBS 240,266,267), which produces the 14-member macrolide 6-deoxyerythronolide B (10.70, Fig. 10.45). DEBS contains three large subunits each of which contains two PKS enzyme modules. Each module contains the minimal PKS enzyme vide supra) and either none (M3), one (ketoreductase KR Ml, M2, MS, and M6), or three (dehydratase DH-enoyl reductase ER-ketoreductase KR, M4) catalytic activities that produce a keto (M3), an hydroxy (Ml, M2, MS and M6), or an unsubstituted methylene (M4) on the last monomeric unit of the growing chain (Fig. 10.45). A final thioesterase (TE) activity catalyzes lactone formation with concomitant release of 10.70 from the multienzyme complex. Introduction of TE activity after an upstream module allows various reduced-size macrolides (10.71-10.73, Eig. 10.45) to be obtained. 

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