Abstract
Tunicamycins are nucleoside natural products and show antibacterial, antiviral and antitumor activities, which are attributed to their inhibition of enzymatic reactions between polyisoprenyl phosphate and UDP-GlcNAc or UDP-MurNAc-pentapeptide. Because of their various intriguing biological activities, tunicamycins have potential as therapeutic agents for infectious diseases or cancers. Structurally, tunicamycins have a unique structure composed of an undecodialdose skeleton, a lipid chain and a GlcNAc fragment linked by a 1,1-β,α-trehalose-type glycosidic bond. In this mini review, we summarize the total chemical syntheses and biosynthetic studies of tunicamycins.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (Grant Number 16H05097 to S.I.), Grant-in Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas “Frontier Research on Chemical Communications” (No. 18H04599 to S.I.), Takeda foundation, Astellas Foundation for Research on Metabolic Disorders, The Tokyo Biomedical Research Foundation and was partly supported by Hokkaido University, Global Facility Center (GFC), Pharma Science Open Unit (PSOU), funded by MEXT under “Support Program for Implementation of New Equipment Sharing System”, the Platform Project for Supporting Drug Discovery and Life Science Research (Basis for Supporting Innovative Drug Discovery and Life Science Research; BINDS) from the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED).
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This manuscript is dedicated to Dr Kiyoshi Isono’s 88 years’ anniversary and his long-standing contribution to the study of antibiotics, especially nucleoside antibiotics, polyoxins.
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Yamamoto, K., Ichikawa, S. Tunicamycin: chemical synthesis and biosynthesis. J Antibiot 72, 924–933 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41429-019-0200-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41429-019-0200-1
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