TerraGen Discovery Inc., 300-2386 East Mall-UBC, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6T 1Z3.
As a route to accessing the potential chemical diversity of uncultivable microbes from the soil, combinatorial biosynthetic libraries were constructed by cloning large fragments of DNA isolated from soil into a Streptomyces lividans host. Four novel compounds, terragines A (1), B (2), C (3), and D (4), were isolated from recombinant 436-s4-5b1, and another novel compound, terragine E (5), was isolated from 446-s3-102g1. The structures were determined by a combination of spectroscopic techniques, primarily 2D NMR.