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In natural product discovery programs, the power of synthetic chemistry is often leveraged for the total synthesis and diversification of characterized metabolites. The synthesis of structures that are bioinformatically predicted to arise from uncharacterized biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) provides a means for synthetic chemistry to enter this process at an early stage. The recent identification of non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs) containing multiple ρ-aminobenzoic acids (PABAs) led us to search soil metagenomes for BGCs that polymerize PABA. Here, we use PABA-specific adenylation-domain sequences to guide the cloning of the  lap  BGC directly from soil. This BGC was predicted to encode a unique N-acylated PABA and thiazole containing structure. Chemical synthesis of this structure gave lapcin, a dual topoisomerase I/II inhibitor with nM to pM IC50s against diverse cancer cell lines. The discovery of lapcin highlights the power of coupling metagenomics, bioinformatics and total chemical synthesis to unlock the biosynthetic potential contained in even complex uncharacterized BGCs.

Lapcin, a potent dual topoisomerase I/II inhibitor discovered by soil metagenome guided total chemical synthesis