Development of effective antimicrobial agents continues to be a great challenge, particularly due to the increasing resistance of superbugs and frequent hospital breakouts. There is an urgent need for more potent and safer antibiotics with novel scaffolds. As historically many commercial drugs were derived from natural products, discovery of antimicrobial agents from complex natural product structures still holds a great promise. Herein, we report the total synthesis of natural albomycins δ1 (1a), δ2 (1b), and ε (1c), which validates the structures of these peptidylnucleoside compounds and allows for synthetic access to bioactive albomycin analogs. The efficient synthesis of albomycins enables extensive evaluations of these natural products against model bacteria and clinical pathogens. Albomycin δ2 has the potential to be developed into an antibacterial drug to treat Streptococcus pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus infections.

Drug repurposing is considered a promising strategy to fight antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Methotrexate (Mtx), a classical anticancer drug, could strongly inhibit bacterial dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR). However, its poor permeability into bacteria and potent human cytotoxicity make it unsuitable as an antibacterial. Herein, we reported the conjugation of Mtx with a siderophore to construct "Trojan horse" antibacterials. The most potent conjugate 8 with nanomolar minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values exhibited over 1.00 × 10 3 -fold improved activity against Gram-positive Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae) and Gram-negative Yersinia enterocolitica (Y. enterocolitica) compared with Mtx, while possessing 2.31 × 10 3 -fold reduced human cytotoxicity, resulting in 2.08 × 10 6 -fold improvements in the therapeutic index. This proof-of-principle study verifies that siderophore conjugation is an effective strategy for developing new antibacterials from anticancer drugs.

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An effective method for the synthesis of multi-substituted β-keto thioethers via Stevens rearrangement of simple β-keto thioethers with arynes has been developed. In these reactions, successive C-S/C-H/C-C bonds were formed in one pot under mild and transition-metal free conditions to afford multi-substituted β-keto thioethers in moderate to good yields.