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On the evolution of functional secondary metabolites (natural products)
Open accessAbstract
Summary: It is argued that organisms have evolved the ability to biosynthesize secondary metabolites (natural products) because of the selectional advantages they obtain as a result of the functions of the compounds. The clustering together of antibiotic biosynthesis, regulation, and resistance genes implies that these genes have been selected as a group and that the antibiotics function in antagonistic capacities in nature. Pleiotropic switching, the simultaneous expression of sporulation and antibiotic biosynthesis genes, is interpreted in terms of the defence roles of antibiotics. We suggest a general mechanism for the evolution of secondary metabolite biosynthesis pathways, and argue against the hypothesis that modern antibiotics had prebiotic effector functions, on the basis that it does not account for modern bio‐synthetic pathways.
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Cited by
Relationship between Secondary Metabolism and Fungal Development
Calvo, A. M., Wilson, R. A., Bok, J. W., & Keller, N. P. (2002) · Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews · doi:10.1128/mmbr.66.3.447-459.2002 · Cited by 1,123
Bacterial Resistance to β-Lactam Antibiotics: Compelling Opportunism, Compelling Opportunity
Fisher, J. F., Meroueh, S. O., & Mobashery, S. (2005) · Chemical Reviews · doi:10.1021/cr030102i · Cited by 913
Marine cyanobacteria—a prolific source of natural products
Burja, A. M., Banaigs, B., Abou-Mansour, E., Grant Burgess, J., & Wright, P. C. (2001) · Tetrahedron · doi:10.1016/s0040-4020(01)00931-0 · Cited by 841
A novel role for Trichoderma secondary metabolites in the interactions with plants
Vinale, F., Sivasithamparam, K., Ghisalberti, E. L., Marra, R., Barbetti, M. J., Li, H., Woo, S. L., & Lorito, M. (2008) · Physiological and Molecular Plant Pathology · doi:10.1016/j.pmpp.2008.05.005 · Cited by 593
Primary metabolism and its control in streptomycetes: A most unusual group of bacteria
Hodgson, D. A. (2000) · Advances in Microbial Physiology · doi:10.1016/s0065-2911(00)42003-5 · Cited by 267
Metadata
- Authors
- Stone, M. J., & Williams, D. H.
- Venue
- Molecular Microbiology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1992-01
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 29-34
- ISSN
- 0950-382X (ISSN-L)
- 1365-2958
- OpenAlex
- W2095882827
- Cited by
- 161
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 4.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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- Stone, M. J., & Williams, D. H. (1992). On the evolution of functional secondary metabolites (natural products). Molecular Microbiology. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2958.1992.tb00834.x
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
