Abstract
Moorea producens JHB, a Jamaican strain of tropical filamentous marine
cyanobacteria, has been extensively studied by traditional natural
products techniques. These previous bioassay and structure guided
isolations led to the discovery of two exciting classes of natural
products, hectochlorin (1) and jamaicamides A (2) and B (3). In the
current study, mass spectrometry-based ‘molecular networking’ was used to
visualize the metabolome of Moorea producens JHB, and both guided and
enhanced the isolation workflow, revealing additional metabolites in these
compound classes. Further, we developed additional insight into the
metabolic capabilities of this strain by genome sequencing analysis, which
subsequently led to the isolation of a compound unrelated to the
jamaicamide and hectochlorin families. Another approach involved
stimulation of the biosynthesis of a minor jamaicamide metabolite by
cultivation in modified media, and provided insights about the underlying
biosynthetic machinery as well as preliminary structure-activity
information within this structure class. This study demonstrated that
these orthogonal approaches are complementary and enrich secondary
metabolomic coverage even in an extensively studied bacterial strain.