The antifungal polyketide soraphen A is produced by the myxobacterium Sorangium cellulosum So ce26. The slow growth, swarming motility and general intransigence of the strain for genetic manipulations make industrial strain development, large-scale fermentation and combinatorial biosynthetic manipulation of the soraphen producer very challenging. To provide a better host for soraphen A producti...

Glycosylations are well-established steps in numerous biosynthetic pathways, and the attached sugar moieties often influence the specificity or pharmacology of the modified compounds. The sorangicins belong to the polyketide family of natural products, and exhibit antibiotic activity through inhibition of bacterial RNA polymerase. We have identified the sorangicin biosynthetic gene cluster in t...

The genome of Sorangium cellulosum has recently been completely sequenced, and it is the largest bacterial genome sequenced so far. In their report, Schneiker et al. (in Complete genome sequence of the myxobacterium Sorangium cellulosum, Nat. Biotechnol., 2007, 25, 1281-1289) concluded that 'In the absence of the GC-skew inversion typically seen at the replication origin of bacterial chromosome...

The myxobacterium Myxococcus xanthus is a predatory member of the soil microfauna, able to consume bacteria (Gram-negative, Gram-positive), archaea, and fungi. Many potential prey of M. xanthus communicate amongst themselves using acyl homoserine lactones (AHLs) as quorum signals. M. xanthus cannot itself produce AHLs, but could potentially benefit by responding to exogenous AHLs produced durin...

BACKGROUND Disorazoles are polyene macrodiolides isolated from a myxobacterium fermentation broth. Disorazole C1 was newly synthesized and found to depolymerize microtubules and cause mitotic arrest. Here we examined the cellular responses to disorazole C1 in both non-cancer and cancer cells and compared our results to vinblastine and taxol. RESULTS In non-cancer cells, disorazole C1 induced ...

The primary structure of a lectin, designated Oscillatoria agardhii agglutinin (OAA), isolated from the freshwater cyanobacterium O. agardhii NIES-204 was determined by the combination of Edman degradation and electron spray ionization-mass spectrometry. OAA is a polypeptide (Mr 13,925) consisting of two tandem repeats. Interestingly, each repeat sequence of OAA showed a high degree of similari...

Genome sequencing of cellulolytic myxobacterium Sorangium cellulosum reveals many open-reading frames (ORFs) encoding various degradation enzymes with low sequence similarity to those reported, but none of them has been characterized. In this paper, a predicted lipase gene (lipA) was cloned from S. cellulosum strain So0157-2 and characterized. lipA is 981-bp in size, encoding a polypeptide of 3...

Rhizopodin (1, Scheme 1) is an architecturally unique polyketide macrolide that was originally isolated from the myxobacterium Myxococcus stipitatus by the groups of Hçfle and Reichenbach. It shows potent antifungal and antiproliferative cytotoxicity against a range of tumor cell lines with IC50 values in the low nanomolar range. [1] On a molecular level, 1 disrupts the cytoskeleton of actin by...