Shiba, Tetsuo

Shiba, Tetsuo (p. 222, Plate 43) born in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan in 1924, received his Ph.D. degree at Osaka University in 1959. After having studied at the National Institute of Health, Bethesda, USA, as Visiting Scientist for two and a half years, he returned to Osaka University as Associate Professor in 1962. In 1971 he was appointed Professor, Laboratory of Natural Product Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Osaka University. Here he developed his structural and synthetic studies on biologically active substances (peptides and others). In the meantime, he served as Vice President of the Chemical Society of Japan, and now as a Member of the Science Council of Japan. He successfully planned the Japan Symposia of Peptide Chemistry and the first international Symposium of Peptide Chemistry in Japan as President of the Organizing Committee in 1987. 

Acknowledgments The author thanks Professor Tetsuo Shiba and Professor Akio Yamamoto who described the History of Chemistry of Japan in Chemistry Archives published from the Chemical Society of Japan in 2004. History of Solution Chemistry of Japan [3] is also referred to. 

SHOICHI KUSUMOTO and TETSUO SHIBA—Osaka University, Faculty of Science, Osaka 560, Japan... 

Dehydroalanine (Dha) and dehydro-a-aminobutyric acid, a putative dehydration product of threonine occur accumulated in a particular class of antibiotic fungal peptides recently named lantibiotics of which Nisin (Fig. 26) will be mentioned first. The structure of the 34-peptide as revealed by Erhard Gross and coworkers in the beginning of the seventies, contains three dehydro side chains, RCH=C(NH—)CO—, and five thioether amino acids, lanthionine, Ala-S-Ala and its homolog Abu-S-Ala. Total synthesis by the group of Tetsuo Shiba (Plate 43) [61]. 

Also in Osaka, another former student of Akabori, professor Tetsuo Shiba (Plate 43) and his associates developed a procedure for the preparation of lanthionine-containing peptides and applied it, in 1988, to the synthesis of the antibiotic nisin (p. 223). In Tokyo, at Rikkyo University, professor Ichiro Muramatsu, also from the Akabori school, proposed a rapid method of synthesis and discovered novel side reactions, such as the formation of guanidine derivatives during coupling with carbodiimides. 

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