Tripartilactam

Dong-Chan Oh and co-workers from Seoul National University have reported in Organic Letters on the isolation of tripartilactam from a bacteria found in a dung beetle’s brood ball.

OL paper

Isolation of Fluorosalinosporamide

Drug discovery is pretty cool especially when you can isolate pure compounds from microbes you grow in a medium – and it can get even more exciting when you can genetically manipulate the microbe so that the compound it makes is slightly different from their original metabolites.  Salinosporamide A is a compound that has a primary chloride, but Bradley Moore and co-workers at Scripps have recently published in the Journal of Natural Products on their isolation of a fluorinated salinosporamide from the microbe that normally makes the chlorinated salinosporamide.  They were able to isolate the fluorinated salinosporamide by replacing the chlorinase gene in Salinispora tropica with the fluorinase gene.

JNP paper