Total Synthesis of the Highly N-Methylated Peptides Carmabin A and Dragomabin

An Overview on Antimalarial Peptides: Natural Sources, Synthetic Methodology and Biological Properties

Peptide compounds play a significant role in medicinal chemistry as they can inhibit the activity of species that cause malaria. This literature review summarizes the isolation of antimalarial peptides, the synthesis method with the detailed structure and sequences of each peptide, and discusses the biological activity of the isolated and synthesized compounds. The synthetic routes and reactions for cyclic and linear antimalarial peptides are systematically highlighted in this review including preparing building blocks, protection and deprotection, coupling and cyclization reactions until the target compound is obtained. Based on the literature data and the results, this review's aim is to provide information to discover and synthesize more antimalarial peptide for future research.

Total Synthesis of Ikoamide, a Highly N-Methylated Antimalarial Lipopeptide

Ikoamide (1) is a highly N-methylated antimalarial lipopeptide that was isolated from a marine cyanobacterium, an Okeania sp. in 2018, which shows strong antimalarial activity without cytotoxicity against human cancer cell lines. To establish a synthetic method for obtaining enough ikoamide for its biological evaluations, we have established a total synthesis of ikoamide. The synthetic method presented here lays the foundation for the development of novel ikoamide analogues, which may lead to a discovery of pharmaceutically unique antimalarial drug leads.

Trends of antimalarial marine natural products: progresses, challenges and opportunities

This review provides an overview of the antimalarial marine natural products, focusing on their chemistry, malaria-related targets and mechanisms, and highlighting their potential for drug development.

A look around the West Indies: The spices of life are secondary metabolites

Natural products possess a wide range of bioactivities with potential for therapeutic usage. While the distribution of these molecules can vary greatly there is some correlation that exists between the biodiversity of an environment and the uniqueness and concentration of natural products found in that region or area. The Caribbean and pan-Caribbean area is home to thousands of species of endemic fauna and flora providing huge potential for natural product discovery and by way, potential leads for drug development. This can especially be said for marine natural products as many of are rapidly diluted through diffusion once released and therefore are highly potent to achieve long reaching effects. This review seeks to highlight a small selection of marine natural products from the Caribbean region which possess antiproliferative, anti-inflammatory and antipathogenic properties while highlighting any synthetic efforts towards bioactive analogs.

Recent advances in chemistry and bioactivity of marine cyanobacteria Moorea species

Cyanobacteria are one of the oldest creatures on earth, originated 3.5-3.3 billion years ago, and are distributed all over the world, including freshwater ponds and lakes, hot springs, and polar ice, especially in tropical and subtropical marine locations. Due to their large multimodular non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS) and polyketide synthases (PKS) biosynthetic machinery, cyanobacteria have represented a significant new source of structurally bioactive secondary metabolites. Moorea as a prolific producer have yielded lots of natural products with a variety of bioactivities such as highly cytotoxicity, anticancer activity, ion channel blocking activity, brine shrimp toxicity and other activities. Some of secondary metabolites have been identified as potential lead compounds for the development of anticancer agents. In this review, a total of 111 bioactive marine cyanobacterial secondary metabolites from the genus Moorea, published in the 54 literatures updated to the middle of 2019 and some synthetic analogues, are discussed with emphasis on their structures and biological activities.

Structure elucidation of bacterial nonribosomal lipopeptides

We provide a summary of the tools, which allow elucidate the structures of nonribosomal lipopetides.