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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2009 Jun 29.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Chem Biol. 2008 Apr;4(4):217–222. doi: 10.1038/nchembio0408-217

Figure 3.

Figure 3

Biosynthetic tangos in the shade of a branching metabolic diversification tree. The vertical tree represents the accessible product spectrum of a particular cyclase-substrate dance pair and is rooted at the edge of the (enzyme-bound) small-molecule conformational energy landscape. The tree casts its shadow across this uneven dance floor, thus highlighting a corresponding horizontal mechanistic decision network. Multistep negotiation of this network across the dance floor constitutes the ‘biosynthetic tango’ between substrate and enzyme that determines the accessibility of alternative reaction pathways leading to distinct stable products.