Oral Presentation Royal Australian Chemical Institute National Congress 2026

Charting the chemical space of Siderophores (136793)

Samuel V Feeney 1 2 , Slade T Matthews 3 , Rachel Codd 2
  1. School of Medical Sciences, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  2. School of Medical Sciences, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  3. School of Pharmacy, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Siderophores are a group of small molecule natural product metal chelators used by bacteria for environmental iron sequestration. The diversity and metal binding affinity in them has been applied to challenges spanning industrial, environmental, and medical fields such as iron overload therapy, heavy metal sequestration, and radiopharmaceuticals to utilise their broad metal chelation and biological stability1-3. Siderophores have been described as diverse but how they compare to both natural and non-natural chelators in the literature have not been explored. This work produced a map of chemical space of natural and non-natural chelators according to a selection of structurally derived molecular descriptors from the literature. Two datasets of natural and non-natural chelators were created by taking natural product and chelator databases from the literature and standardising their molecular structures. Doing this we observed distinct trends between the two chelator groups and unique regions of chemical space observed by both. Further analysis was performed on the density of the two datasets indicating their internal diversity across chemical space. This work hopes to inform the selection of chelators for broader applications in industrial, environmental, and medical fields as well as explain the span of diversity from siderophores and other chelator groups in the literature.

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  2. Ahmed, E.; Holmström, S. J. Siderophores in environmental research: roles and applications. Microb Biotechnol 2014, 7 (3), 196-208. DOI: 10.1111/1751-7915.12117 From NLM.
  3. Gräff, Á. T.; Barry, S. M. Siderophores as tools and treatments. npj Antimicrobials and Resistance 2024, 2 (1), 47. DOI: 10.1038/s44259-024-00053-4.