landomycin-a and Neoplasms

Covering: 1997 to 2010. The angucycline group is the largest group of type II PKS-engineered natural products, rich in biological activities and chemical scaffolds. This stimulated synthetic creativity and biosynthetic inquisitiveness. The synthetic studies used five different strategies, involving Diels-Alder reactions, nucleophilic additions, electrophilic additions, transition-metal mediated cross-couplings and intramolecular cyclizations to generate the angucycline frames. Biosynthetic studies were particularly intriguing when unusual framework rearrangements by post-PKS tailoring oxidoreductases occurred, or when unusual glycosylation reactions were involved in decorating the benz[a]anthracene-derived cores. This review follows our previous reviews, which were published in 1992 and 1997, and covers new angucycline group antibiotics published between 1997 and 2010. However, in contrast to the previous reviews, the main focus of this article is on new synthetic approaches and biosynthetic investigations, most of which were published between 1997 and 2010, but go beyond, e.g. for some biosyntheses all the way back to the 1980s, to provide the necessary context of information.

Topics: Aminoglycosides; Anthraquinones; Anti-Bacterial Agents; Biological Products; Biosynthetic Pathways; Carbohydrate Sequence; Cell Line, Tumor; Coumarins; Glycosides; Glycosylation; Humans; Isoquinolines; Molecular Structure; Naphthoquinones; Neoplasms; Polyketides; Quinones; Streptomyces; Structure-Activity Relationship

This review covers existing literature (from 1990 to 2008) on landomycins (LS), a family of glycosylated angucyclines, with an emphasis on the bioactivity scope of landomycin (La)-like structures accessible via biocombinatorial manipulations. Some LS display strong antitumor activity and have inspired several chemical studies focused mainly on their unusual deoxysugar chains. A decade of genetic studies on La-producing bacteria has provided many novel molecules with altered structure and activity. A complex nonlinear correlation between the length of the carbohydrate tail of LS and their antitumor activity has also been revealed. It implies that simpler LS than the largest member of the family, LaA, are still potential drug leads. Combinatorial biosynthesis appears to be a powerful tool to search the chemical space around the La scaffold.

Topics: Aminoglycosides; Animals; Antibiotics, Antineoplastic; Humans; Neoplasms; Streptomyces