Abstract
In Prague in 1964, the participants in theInternational Congress on Antibiotics collectively presented an authoritative account of the existing understanding of the mechanism of biosynthesis of many of the major groups of antibiotics and other microbial metabolites. This information was derived to a large extent from applications of the then comparatively novel radioisotopic technique for studying the mode incorporation of labelled precursors. The intervening 30 years has witnessed remarkable progress in techniques for manipulating microbial genes and enzymes, while at the chemical level, advances in spectroscopic and chromatographic procedures have facilitated the use of stable isotopes as direct probes for the small scale exploration of metabolic pathways. As a consequence, our understanding of many mechanistic details has been considerably enhanced. Some of the developments to date will be reviewed, with particular reference to the elaboration of biosynthetic pathways leading to many of the antibiotics and other natural products described at the earlier Prague symposium.
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Dedicated to Dr. Z. Vaněk on the occasion of his 70th birthday
It gives me particular pleasure to dedicate this contribution to Dr. Vaněk on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Zdenko Vaněk together with Zdeněk Hošt’álek edited the proceedings of the panel discussion (Vaněk and Hošt’álek 1965) on ‘The Biogenesis of Antibiotic Substances’ held during theAntibiotics Congress in Prague in 1964. As one of the few speakers in the present symposium*** who also participated in that meeting 30 years ago, I thought that it might be appropriate to highlight subsequent developments in selected areas of biosynthesis documented in that earlier publication.
These will focus primarily on penicillins and cephalosporins, tetracyclines, ring cleavage pathways and the macrolide antibiotics, which relate to the presentations by several of the earlier participants, includingE. P. Abraham, G. G. F. Newton andS. C. Warren, R. Bentley, J. D. Bu’Lock, W. D. Celmer, J. W. Corcoran, S. Gatenbeck, C. H. Hassall, M. Herold andZ. Hošťálek, I. Málek, J. R. D. McCormick, S. W. Tanenbaum and myself.
Panel DiscussionBasic Research and Practical Aspects of Antibiotic Production held during theAntibiotica Congressus cum Participatione Internationali, Prague, June 15–19, 1964.
Bacteriological Symposium BS-12Regulation of Microbial Product Overproduction, July 7, 1994 (IUMS Congresses ’94).
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Thomas, R. Some developments in the biosynthesis of antibiotics. Folia Microbiol 40, 4–16 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02816523
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02816523