Scalaradial, a Dialdehyde‐Containing Marine Metabolite That Causes an Unexpected Noncovalent PLA2 Inactivation

Several marine terpenoids that contain at least one reactive aldehyde group, such as manoalide and its congeners, possess interesting anti‐inflammatory activities that are mediated by the covalent inactivation of secretory phospholipase A2 (sPLA2). Scalaradial, a 1,4‐dialdehyde marine terpenoid that was isolated from the sponge Cacospongia mollior, is endowed with a relevant anti‐inflammatory profile, both in vitro and in vivo, through selective sPLA2 inhibition. Due to its peculiar dialdehyde structural feature, it has been proposed that scalaradial exerts its enzymatic inactivation by means of an irreversible covalent modification of its target. In the context of our on‐going research on anti‐PLA2 natural products and their interaction at a molecular level, we studied scalaradial in an attempt to shed more light on the molecular mechanism of its PLA2 inhibition. A detailed analysis of the reaction profile between scalaradial and bee venom PLA2, a model sPLA2 that shares a high structural homology with the human synovial enzyme, was performed by a combination of spectroscopic techniques, chemical reactions (selective modifications, biomimetic reactions), and classical protein chemistry (such as proteolytic digestion, HPLC and mass spectrometry), along with molecular modeling studies. Unexpectedly, our data clearly indicated the noncovalent forces to be the leading event in the PLA2 inactivation process; thus, the covalent modification of the enzyme emerges as only a minor side event in the ligand–enzyme interaction. The overall picture might be useful in the design of SLD analogues as new potential anti‐inflammatory compounds that target sPLA2 enzymes.