Activation of cryptic metabolite production through gene disruption: Dimethyl furan-2,4-dicarboxylate produced by Streptomyces sahachiroi

• Dinesh Simkhada,
• Huitu Zhang,
• Shogo Mori,
• Howard Williams and
• Coran M. H. Watanabe

Beilstein J. Org. Chem. 2013, 9, 1768–1773, doi:10.3762/bjoc.9.205

• , dimethyl furan-2,4-dicarboxylate. The cryptic metabolite represents the first non-azinomycin related compound to be isolated and characterized from the soil bacterium, S. sahachiroi. The results from this study suggest that abolishing production of otherwise predominant natural products through genetic

• knockout may constitute a means to “activate” the production of novel secondary metabolites that would otherwise lay dormant within microbial genome sequences. Keywords: cryptic metabolite; dimethyl furan-2,4-dicarboxylate; genetic knockout; natural products; non-ribosomal peptide synthetase module

• overproduction of the cryptic metabolite dimethyl furan-2,4-dicarboxylate and led to complete abolishment of azinomycin production. It is the first non-azinomycin related metabolite to be reported from the S. sahachiroi strain, a microorganism that has been mined for its natural product constituents since 1954