Really beautiful piece of work from Nadine Ziemert et al - Resurrecting ancestral antibiotics: unveiling the origins of modern lipid II targeting glycopeptides www.nature.com/articles/s41...#MicroSky#EvoSky
Glycopeptide antibiotics (GPAs) are microbial natural products synthesized by multiple enzymes, including a nonribosomal peptide synthetase for assembly of the peptide core. Here, the authors use comp...
Thanks Dan. Appreciate it 😍
Cool study from @nadineziemert.bsky.social and colleagues: predicting the nonribosomal peptide synthetase assembly line of paleomycin, the ancestral parent of lipid II targeting glycopeptide antibiotics➡️synthetic biology to produce the predicted peptide and validation of antibiotic activity
Our Frankenstein antibiotic Paleomycin is out. Thanks to all partners and collaborators for this cool interdisciplinary project. Loved all eight years of it. We resurrected the ancient glycopeptide antibiotic. #antibiotics#evolution#secmet@danielpetras.bsky.socialwww.nature.com/articles/s41...
It seems significant that there's a deluge of obfuscated noise published in Nature/Cell/Science/NEJM (e.g. Poore 2020) and all the very tedious work debunk/debug/refute ends up as blog posts, pubpeer posts and in the very best case in mBio (eg journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....)
With @nadineziemert.bsky.social@hassansalem.bsky.social, Jon Moller, Yuliana Christopher, Caitlin Conn, Quimi Vidaurre, Andre Rodrigues, Tim Read and Nicole Gerardo. (2/2)
New preprint! Excited to share our latest on the secondary metabolism of fungi. We find that the biosynthetic gene clusters of Escovopsis and close relatives, symbionts of fungus-growing ants and their cultivars, reflect their specialized lifestyle. #MicroSky 🦠🧫#SymbioSky (1/2)
Genomic insights into the evolution of secondary metabolism of Escovopsis and its allies, specialized fungal symbionts of fungus-farming ants https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.06.564974v1
The metabolic intimacy of symbiosis often demands the work of specialists. Natural products and defe