The Advancement of Peptides Derived from Kitasatospora

Abstract

Kitasatospora continue to be a rich source of chemically diverse and bioactive peptide natural products. This review highlights two strategies in peptide natural products research of Kitasatospora, 1) natural product-first approach guided by a major compound, biological activity or genomic analysis, and 2) enzyme-first approach guided by bioinformatic tools to construct a sequence similarity network for the discovery of biosynthetic enzymes. The structures of peptides, biosynthetic origins of unique building blocks, recent reports of post-translational modifying enzymes for constructing these peptides, and knowledge gap in biosynthesis will also be presented. Actinobacteria belonging to the genus Kitasatospora are a source of biosynthetic enzymes to expand the biocatalytic toolbox for synthetic biology.

Keywords: Biosynthesis; Kitasatospora; enzymes; natural products; peptides.