Bacterial resistance to antibiotics has seriously limited our capacity to overcome infectious disease. Cases of resistance have emerged in virtually all hospital-acquired pathogen-antimicrobial combinations. Soon our most serious infectious threats will be untreatable given our dwindling arsenal of effective antibiotics. Our long-term research goals are to develop synthetic access to biologically interesting peptide antibiotics, to gain insight into their mechanism/mode of action, and to apply the knowledge gained to the development of alternative antibiotics with improved activity against resistant phenotypes. This proposal describes the total synthesis and mechanistic characterization of Ramoplanin, a novel beta-sheet lipodepsipeptide antibiotic with proven activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium, and cephalosporin-resistant Streptococcus pneumonia, three important Gram positive opportunistic human pathogens. By an unclear mechanism, Ramoplanin appears to arrest bacterial cell wall development at the level of MurG, a glycosyltransferase involved in an intermediate stage of peptidoglycan biosynthesis. Since MurG activity is essential for proper bacterial cell wall development, it is an attractive target for antibacterial design. Harnessing the clinical antibiotic potential of Ramoplanin critically hinges on gaining synthetic access to its structure and deconvoluting the most intimate details of its mechanism of action. To accomplish this we will synergistically merge total synthesis, mechanistic enzymology and protein biophysics to completely correlate structure to antibiotic function. We plan to synthesize Ramoplanin and related analogues using solid-phase methods, thus providing a general synthetic route to favorably modulate its physiochemical properties. We plan to identify the molecular target of Ramoplanin and determine the interaction energies, specificities, and structure of the inhibitory complex. We will assess the inhibitory effect of Ramoplanin on the MurG reaction and on the mechanistically related peptidoglycan transglycosylation cross-linking reaction that takes place on the outer surface of the bacterial cell membrane. Collectively these studies will provide a clear picture of the mechanism of Ramoplanin inhibition of peptidoglycan biosynthesis and promote the design, synthesis, and biological evaluation of a new generation of antibiotics capable of combating bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
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