Novel bioactive lipodepsipeptides from Pseudomonas syringae: the pseudomycins.

The covalent structure and most of the stereochemistry of the pseudomycins, bioactive metabolites of a transposon-generated mutant of a Pseudomonas syringae wild-type strain proposed for the biological control of Dutch elm disease, have been determined. While two pseudomycins are identical to the known syringopeptins 25-A and 25-B, pseudomycins A, B, C, C' are new lipodepsinonapeptides. For all of these the peptide moiety corresponds to L-Ser-D-Dab-L-Asp-L-Lys-L-Dab-L-aThr-Z-Dhb-L-Asp(3-OH) -L-Thr (4-Cl) with the terminal carboxyl group closing a macrocyclic ring on the OH group of the N-terminal Ser. This is in turn N-acylated by 3,4-dihydroxytetradecanoate in pseudomycin A, by 3-hydroxytetradecanoate in pseudomycin B, by 3,4-dihydroxyhexadecanoate in pseudomycin C, and by 3-hydroxyhexadecanoate in pseudomycin C'. Some preliminary data on the biological activity of pseudomycin A are reported.