Fig. 6. Compound 3 can be used to manipulate other natural product biosynthesis pathways.

a,c, Comparative metabolomic analysis of culture supernatants of (a) B. cereus UW85 and (c) B. formosus ATCC 51669 treated with inhibitor 3 versus untreated. Inhibitor treatment leads to a decrease in production of zwittermicin or edeines, respectively, with an accumulation of precursor metabolites in both cases. Selected mass features associated with each natural product are highlighted in orange. Significance calculated using one-sided Student’s t-test. b,d, Schemes for the reported and proposed prodrug activation steps in (b) zwittermicin and (d) edeine A1 biosynthesis, respectively, which are consistent with the observed metabolomic shifts. A complete list of the mass features identified in the experiment with B. cereus UW85 showing significant changes can be found in Supplementary Table 4, and those from B. formosus ATCC 51669 can be found in Supplementary Table 5.