Nature's Cowboys

Although I have never done research in the area, I have long been fascinated by molecular architecture that people create. Rotaxanes and catenanes have been targets for synthesis for many years. I often pondered whether this type of molecular assembly was purly synthetic or if there were natural analogs. All these years and I have never seen one from nature. Although, I should say, I have never searched for them. But I was quite astonished today when perusing the JACS ASAP articles to see this paper on the characterization of a lasso peptide. Finally confirmation that nature is indeed wiser than all of us and has probably already made anything that we can come up with. It's an interesting compound and makes me wonder why nature needs the lasso. Are there biological ranches with peptidic cowboys riding around? Does she use this to rope bacterial calves? I think I'll have to learn more.

Isolation and Structural Characterization of Capistruin, a Lasso Peptide Predicted from the Genome Sequence of Burkholderia thailandensis E264

Thomas A. Knappe, Uwe Linne, Séverine Zirah, Sylvie Rebuffat, Xiulan Xie, and Mohamed A. Marahiel

DOI: 10.1021/ja802966g