Press release: Antibiotic-like Substances from the Jurassic Period

Nr. 243/2015 - 20.10.2015

Team of scientists from Göttingen and Linz deciphers molecular structure of fossil pigments

(pug) Analysis of enigmatic pinkish-colored fossils of putative red algae has led to a great surprise: the fossil pigments from the Jurassic period are substances showing an astonishing similarity to a present-day antibiotic only recently discovered. Using cutting-edge analytical methods, a team of scientists from the University of Göttingen, the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (MPI-BPC) in Göttingen, and the University of Linz elucidated the molecular structure of the fossil pigments in detail. The results were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

The scientists compared the fossil substances (borolithochromes) with present-day natural products, with the result that there is only a single known substance with a comparable chemical structure: the antibiotic clostrubin, which is known to be active against multiple drug-resistant hospital bugs. „The strong similarity of the fossil pigments with the present-day antibiotic, which was discovered only last year in a bacterium, proves that the fossil substances are preserved almost unchanged after more than 150 million years and were originally also produced by a bacterium,” says Dr. Klaus Wolkenstein from Göttingen University’s Geoscience Centre.

„The determination of the chemical structures based on the tiny amounts of preserved substances was a real challenge,” says Dr. Han Sun from the MPI-BPC. „The finding that the same configuration that derives from the amino acid isoleucine occurs in the borolithochromes indicates their biological origin,” adds Prof. Dr. Christian Griesinger from the MPI-BPC. The results provide a unique insight into the diversity of natural products in ancient times and show how little the building plans of functional natural products have changed during the course of evolution. „No one would have expected to find such perfectly preserved natural products in the fossil remains of an organism from the Jurassic period,” says Dr. Wolkenstein.

Original publication: Klaus Wolkenstein, Han Sun, Heinz Falk, Christian Griesinger (2015): Structure and absolute configuration of Jurassic polyketide-derived spiroborate pigments obtained from microgram quantities. Journal of the American Chemical Society. Doi:10.1021/jacs.5b08191.

Contact:
Dr. Klaus Wolkenstein
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Faculty of Geoscience and Geography
Geoscience Center – Department Geobiology
Goldschmidtstraße 3, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
Phone: +49 551 39-7955
Email: klaus.wolkenstein@geo.uni-goettingen.de
Web: www.geobiologie.uni-goettingen.de/index_e.shtml