Chapter 19 Enzymology of Aminoglycoside Biosynthesis—Deduction from Gene Clusters

The classical aminoglycosides are, with very few exceptions, typically actinobacterial secondary metabolites with antimicrobial activities all mediated by inhibiting translation on the 30S subunit of the bacterial ribosome. Some chemically related natural products inhibit glucosidases by mimicking oligo-alpha-1,4-glucosides. The biochemistry of the aminoglycoside biosynthetic pathways is still a developing field since none of the pathways has been analyzed to completeness as yet. In this chapter we treat the enzymology of aminoglycoside biosyntheses as far as it becomes apparent from recent investigations based on the availability of DNA sequence data of biosynthetic gene clusters for all major structural classes of these bacterial metabolites. We give a more general overview of the field, including descriptions of some key enzymes in various aminoglycoside pathways, whereas in Chapter 20 provides a detailed account of the better-studied enzymology thus far known for the neomycin and butirosin pathways.