(670e) Microbial Biosynthesis of Terminal Alkynes

The terminal alkyne is a functionality widely used in organic synthesis, pharmaceuticals and material science. It is a particularly useful moiety in the azide-alkyne click chemistry reactions which have recently emerged to become one of the most powerful tools in drug discovery and chemical biology. Despite the importance of the terminal alkyne and its prevalence in synthetic compounds, the biosynthetic routes to terminal alkynes are not well understood. Here, we report the characterization of the first thiolation-dependent terminal alkyne biosynthetic pathway in microbes. We further demonstrate that this pathway can be exploited for in situ generation and incorporation of terminal alkynes into various natural product scaffolds.