The present invention relates to hybrid glycosylated products, and in
particular, to natural products such as polyketides and glycopeptides,
and to processes for their preparation. The invention is particularly
concerned with recombinant cells in which a cloned microbial
glycosyltransferase can be conveniently screened for its ability to
generate specific glycosylated derivatives when supplied with polyketide,
peptide, or polyketide-peptides as substrates. The invention demonstrates
that cloned glycosyltransferases when rapidly screened for their ability
to attach a range of activated sugars to a range of exogenously supplied
or endogenously generated aglycone templates, show a surprising
flexibility towards both aglycone and sugar substrates, and that this
process allows the production of glycosylated polyketides in good yield.
This overcomes the problem not only of supplying novel sugar attachments
to individual polyketides, including polyketides altered by genetic
engineering, but also of increasing the diversity of polyketide libraries
by combinatorial attachment of sugars.