Lomaiviticins’ structures get a revision

Abstract

Chemists are rethinking lomaiviticins—potent killers of cancer cells and bacteria. A new study shows that the structures of these complex natural products, which are metabolites of marine bacteria, differ from what researchers thought for 20 years. A team led by the University of California, Los Angeles’s Hosea M. Nelson and Yale University’s Seth B. Herzon revised the structural assignments with the help of the cryo-electron microscopy technique known as microcrystal electron diffraction (microED). MicroED essentially gives a picture of a molecule’s skeleton. Other commonly used techniques, including nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry, can fill in details, such as where heteroatoms are located. “This is a tool that can help you solve molecules when there are arrangements and connectivity that can’t really be unambiguously determined using NMR,” says Nelson, who has championed the technique . Chemists at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and the University of Utah first reported the lomaiviticins’ structures in