Structure and Biosynthesis of Hectoramide B, a Linear Depsipeptide from the Marine Cyanobacterium JHB Discovered via Co-culture with .

The tropical marine cyanobacterium JHB is a prolific source of secondary metabolites with potential biomedical utility. Previous studies of this strain led to the discovery of several novel compounds such as the hectochlorins and jamaicamides; however, bioinformatic analyses of its genome suggested that there were many more cryptic biosynthetic gene clusters yet to be characterized. To potentially stimulate the production of novel compounds from this strain, it was co-cultured with . From this experiment, we observed the increased production of a new compound that we characterize here as hectoramide B. Bioinformatic analysis of the JHB genome enabled the identification of a putative biosynthetic gene cluster responsible for hectoramide B biosynthesis. This work demonstrates that co-culture competition experiments can be a valuable method to facilitate the discovery of novel natural products from cyanobacteria.