Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Nat Prod Rep. 2015 Nov;32(11):1534-40. doi: 10.1039/c5np00091b.
This highlight provides an overview of recent progress towards elucidating the structure, biosynthesis, and mode of action of colibactin, a genotoxic secondary metabolite synthesized by human gut bacteria. While isolating colibactin has been problematic, efforts to characterize its biosynthesis have provided critical information that has led to a rapid increase in our knowledge of this metabolite's structure and function. Major questions and gaps remain however, and the broader lessons learned from studying colibactin underscore central challenges to be faced in the genomics era of natural product research and in efforts to understand the human microbiome.
本研究亮点概述了阐明肠细菌合成的遗传毒性次级代谢产物——大肠杆菌素的结构、生物合成和作用模式的最新进展。尽管分离大肠杆菌素具有一定的挑战性，但对其生物合成进行的特征分析提供了关键信息，使我们对该代谢物的结构和功能有了快速的了解。然而，仍存在主要问题和空白，并且从研究大肠杆菌素中吸取的经验教训强调了在天然产物研究的基因组时代以及在理解人类微生物组方面需要面临的核心挑战。
