The New Antibiotics, Questiomycins A and B

Abstract

In the course of searching new antibiotics using Mycobacterium tuberculosis BCG as the test organism, two antitubercular antibiotics were obtained as crystalline forms from the culture fluid of a streptomyces which was isolated from the soil collected in Kunitachi, Tokyo and their chemical and physical properties, biolgical activities and chemical structures were studied. They were identified as 6-aminophenoxazone and o-aminophenol respectively. Altough these compounds have been already synthesized and known to have antitubercular activities¹⁾, they were firstly isolated from culture fluid of a streptomyces by authors and the former was named questiomycin A and the latter questiomycin B respectively. In this paper the authors wish to describe the isolation, purification, chemical and physical properties, microbiological spectra and the structural determinations of these two antibiotics.