Structure of Ralsolamycin, the Interkingdom Morphogen from the Crop Plant Pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum

Ralsolamycin, an inducer of chlamydospore formation in fungi, was recently reported from the plant pathogenic bacterium Ralstonia solanacearum. Although interpretation of tandem mass data and bioinformatics enabled a preliminary chemical characterization, the full structure of ralsolamycin was not resolved. We now report the recovery of this secondary metabolite from an engineered R. solanacearum strain. The structure of ralsolamycin was elucidated by extensive spectroscopic analyses. Chemical derivatization as well as bioinformatics were used to assign the absolute stereochemistry. Our results identified an erroneous genome sequence, thereby emphasizing the value of chemical methods to complement bioinformatics-based procedures in natural product research.