Vanblastine Paclitaxel At first glance it seems odd that two such dissimilar str

Question

Vanblastine                                                        Paclitaxel

At first glance it seems odd that two such dissimilar structures would target the same biomolecule. Yet we know that natural products are intrinsically rich and promiscuous with regard to biological activites. State the reason why secondary metabolites manifest the property of interacting with multiple structurally diverse biopolymers and conversely, how a biopolymer can bind multiple structurally dissimilar secondary metabolites.

----> I believe it's biopolymers in general.

Explanation / Answer

These metabolites are indeed, very different structurally speaking. We can see that just by looking at them. Double bonds, benzene rings, functional groups, carbons that are substituted in different orders. In fact, organisms have thousands of different proteins and enzymes. But they are infinitely less than the amount of organic compounds that can form. The fact that carbon has four spots to form covalent bonds gives an great amount of diversity. It would be very time-consuming to have one protein for each metabolite. And these are only naturally occurring metabolites, there are also a great variety of synthetic metabolites.

The reason why a biomolecule can process diverse organic structures is that it recognizes the functional groups that they have in common. For example, in this case, both vanblastine and paclitaxel have the same carboxylic acid group that might be recognized by a protein and make it bind to its active site. The protein "reads" the functional group and the rest of the polymer is just referred to as "R", which is the rest of the molecule. The more common functional groups they have, the more biomolecules in common that can process the metabolites, even if their "insides" are notably different.

This refers to proteins and enzymes that are less specific. Other polypeptides are much more specific and recognize more parts of the polymers. For biopolymers that are not specific, there are many proteins that can process the same small functional group.

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