SYNTHESIS OF EDEINE DERIVATIVES AS AN APPROACH TO TACKLE THE ANTIBIOTIC CRISIS

Abstract

Abstract The current rise in antibiotic resistance and lack of discovery of new antibiotics in recent years has caused an antibiotic crisis. A strategy for overcoming this crisis is to relook at previously discarded antibiotics and with medicinal chemistry, use their structure as a scaffold for the development of a new antibiotic. Edeines are a group of antimicrobials discovered by Kurylo-Borowska in 1959 that were discarded for toxicity and this work aimed to use edeine for the structural basis in the development of a novel antibiotic. Using both solution phase and solid phase peptide synthesis ꞵ-tyrosine-L-isoseryl-diaminopropionic acid was synthesized to develop a synthetic strategy for the peptide synthesis of Edeine A. Solid phase peptide synthesis techniques were used to synthesize two simplified edeine analogues which demonstrated that the amino acid 2,6-diamino-7-hydroxylazaleic acid was necessary for antimicrobial activity. A synthetic strategy for the synthesis of 2,6-diamino-7-hydroxylazaleic acid (DAHAA) using ring closing metathesis and aminohydroxylation was developed and starting materials were synthesized. Using solid phase synthesis and the strategy for synthesizing DAHAA, a library of edeine analogues could be made using parallel synthesis and assayed for specific antimicrobial activity. This could lead to the development of a lead antibiotic which used edeine as a structural scaffold, therefore a novel antibiotic could be clinically used without large scale resistance present in the environment like the currently used antibiotics.