Antimicrobial resistance has been seriously threatening human health, and discovering new antimicrobial agents from the natural resource is still an important pathway among various strategies to prevent resistance. Guanidine-containing polyhydroxyl macrolides, containing a polyhydroxyl lactone ring and a guanidyl side chain, can be produced by many actinomycetes and have been proved to possess many bioactivities, especially broad-spectrum antibacterial and antifungal activities. To explore the potential of these compounds to be developed into new antimicrobial agents, a review on their structural diversities, spectroscopic characterizations, bioactivities, acute toxicities, antimicrobial mechanisms, and the structure-activity relationship was first performed based on the summaries and analyses of related publications from 1959 to 2019. A total of 63 guanidine-containing polyhydroxyl macrolides were reported, including 46 prototype compounds isolated from 33 marine and terrestrial actinomycetes and 17 structural derivatives. Combining with their antimicrobial mechanisms, structure-activity relationship analyses indicated that the terminal guanidine group and lactone ring of these compounds are vital for their antibacterial and antifungal activities. Further, based on their bioactivities and toxicity analyses, the discovery of guanidyl side-chain targeting to lipoteichoic acid of Staphylococcus aureus indicated that these compounds have a great potency to be developed into antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory drugs.
Keywords: antibacterial; antifungal; antimicrobial; azalomycin F; bioactivity; guanidine; macrolide; structural diversity; structure-activity relationship; toxicity.