You are currently viewing the abstract.
View Full TextLog in to view the full text
AAAS login provides access to Science for AAAS members, and access to other journals in the Science family to users who have purchased individual subscriptions.
Register for free to read this article
As a service to the community, this article is available for free. Existing users log in.
More options
Download and print this article for your personal scholarly, research, and educational use.
Buy a single issue of Science for just $15 USD.
Abstract
Cycloaddition is an essential tool in chemical synthesis. Instead of using light or heat as a driving force, marine sponges promote cycloaddition with a more versatile but poorly understood mechanism in producing pyrrole–imidazole alkaloids sceptrin, massadine, and ageliferin. Through de novo synthesis of sceptrin and massadine, we show that sponges may use single-electron oxidation as a central mechanism to promote three different types of cycloaddition. Additionally, we provide surprising evidence that, in contrast to previous reports, sceptrin, massadine, and ageliferin have mismatched chirality. Therefore, massadine cannot be an oxidative rearrangement product of sceptrin or ageliferin, as is commonly believed. Taken together, our results demonstrate unconventional chemical approaches to achieving cycloaddition reactions in synthesis and uncover enantiodivergence as a new biosynthetic paradigm for natural products.
Sceptrin goes through the looking glass
Marine sponges produce a trio of compounds—sceptrin, massadine, and ageliferin—that have intrigued chemists because they seemed to result from ring-forming reactions outside the standard repertoire of enzyme catalysis. Ma et al. now report laboratory syntheses of the first two compounds that uncover a surprising twist: It turns out the real structure of sceptrin is the mirror image of the originally reported structure. The work partially bolsters the prevailing biosynthetic hypothesis, though its revelation of enantiodivergence (the emergence of distinct mirror-image motifs in one compound class) is a rare event in natural product chemistry.
Science, this issue p. 219
