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An ordinary laboratory flask was used to extract
enzymes, the catalysts used to synthesize an antibiotic natural
product in Brad Moore's laboratory.
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"This study may signal the start of a new era
in how drugs are synthesized," said Moore, a professor in the Center
for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps. "Assembling all
the enzymes together in a single reaction vessel is a different way to
make a complex molecule."
While much more work is needed to employ this process on a mass scale,
the achievement proves that such synthesis is possible relatively
cheaply and easily-without the use of man-made chemicals-otherwise
known as "green" chemistry.
Most of the medicinal drugs on the market today are made synthetically.
Researchers such as Moore and Scripps Oceanography's Bill Fenical have
looked to the oceans as rich sources of new natural products to
potentially combat diseases such as cancer.
The antibiotic synthesized in Moore's laboratory, called enterocin,
was assembled in approximately two hours. Such a compound would
normally take months if not a year to prepare chemically, according to
Moore.
Rather than a "eureka" moment that led to the breakthrough, Moore said
the process was achieved incrementally. The time-consuming work was
spent beforehand identifying and preparing the enzymes that would
ultimately catalyze the synthesis, also known as assembling the "biosynthetic
pathway."
"We've been preparing for some time now a 'biological toolbox,'" said
Moore. "In this new process the enzymes become the tools to do the
synthesis."
An article in Nature Chemical Biology by Robert Fecik of the
University of Minnesota indicated that "... Moore and co-workers have
now taken biosynthetic pathway reconstruction to a new level."
The new research also carries the potential to combine certain natural
enzymes to produce new molecules that typically cannot be found in
nature with the goal of developing new drugs. Moore calls these "unnatural
natural products."
Also joining Cheng and Moore in the research were Dario Meluzzi of the
UC San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and
Longkuan Xiang and Miho Izumikawa of the University of Arizona.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health supported the research.
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