Modern transfer RNAs (tRNAs) are composed of ~76 nucleotides and play an important role as "adaptor" molecules that mediate the translation of information from messenger RNAs (mRNAs). Many studies suggest that the contemporary full-length tRNA was formed by the ligation of half-sized hairpin-like RNAs. A minihelix (a coaxial stack of the acceptor stem on the T-stem of tRNA) can function both in...

Non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) are large enzymatic complexes that catalyse the synthesis of biologically active peptides in microorganisms. Genetic engineering has recently been applied to reprogram NRPSs to produce lipopeptides with a new sequence. The carboxyl-terminal thioesterase (TE) domains from NRPSs catalyse cleavage products by hydrolysis or complex macrocyclization. In this...

Condensation (C) domains in the nonribosomal peptide synthetases are capable of catalyzing peptide bond formation between two consecutively bound various amino acids. C-domains coincide in frequency with the number of peptide bonds in the product peptide. In this study, a phylogenetic approach was used to investigate structural diversity of bacterial C-domains. Phylogenetic trees show that the ...

The Gram-positive bacterium Paenibacillus larvae is the etiological agent of American Foulbrood. This bacterial infection of honey bee brood is a notifiable epizootic posing a serious threat to global honey bee health because not only individual larvae but also entire colonies succumb to the disease. In the recent past considerable progress has been made in elucidating molecular aspects of host...

Motivation: Secondary metabolites (SM) are structurally diverse natural products of high pharmaceutical importance. Genes involved in their biosynthesis are often organized in clusters, i.e., are co-localized and co-expressed. In silico cluster prediction in eukaryotic genomes remains problematic mainly due to the high variability of the clusters’ content and lack of other distinguishing sequen...

The program package 'ClustScan' (Cluster Scanner) is designed for rapid, semi-automatic, annotation of DNA sequences encoding modular biosynthetic enzymes including polyketide synthases (PKS), non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS) and hybrid (PKS/NRPS) enzymes. The program displays the predicted chemical structures of products as well as allowing export of the structures in a standard format...

Cyclodipeptide synthases (CDPSs) belong to a newly defined family of enzymes that use aminoacyl-tRNAs (aa-tRNAs) as substrates to synthesize the two peptide bonds of various cyclodipeptides, which are the precursors of many natural products with noteworthy biological activities. Here, we describe the crystal structure of AlbC, a CDPS from Streptomyces noursei. The AlbC structure consists of a m...

Non-ribosomal peptide (NRP) synthesis in fungi requires a ready supply of proteogenic and non-proteogenic amino acids which are subsequently incorporated into the nascent NRP via a thiotemplate mechanism catalyzed by NRP synthetases. Substrate amino acids can be modified prior to or during incorporation into the NRP, or following incorporation into an early stage amino acid-containing biosynthe...

Secondary metabolites (or natural products) are often synthesized by multi-modular, multi-domain proteins called non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS) and polyketide synthases (PKS). Various well-known metabolites produced by microorganisms are listed in Table 1, and examples of structures are shown in Fig. 1. In particular, Streptomyces species are known for their ability to produce a wide ...

Bacillus and related genera in the Bacillales within the Firmicutes harbor a variety of secondary metabolite gene clusters encoding polyketide synthases and non-ribosomal peptide synthetases responsible for remarkable diverse number of polyketides (PKs) and lipopeptides (LPs). These compounds may be utilized for medical and agricultural applications. Here, we summarize the knowledge on structur...