Peptide splicing is a prevalent biosynthetic strategy for installing β-amino acid pharmacophores

Abstract

In the October issue of <i>Chem</i>, Piel and co-workers revealed that the biosynthetic potential for the incorporation of pharmacophoric α-keto-β-amino acids in ribosomal peptides is distributed across members of a wealth of bacterial genera. This unusual post-translational modification can potentially be applied to drug discovery and design, particularly of protease inhibitors.