Serine and metallo b-lactamases catalyze the hydrolysis of blactam rings in all classes of blactam antibiotics which is a major cause of bacterial resistance to b-lactam antibiotics. Bacterial resistance is addressed clinically by combining a b-lactamase inhibitor, such as clavulanic acid, sulbactam, or tazobactam, with a b-lactam antibiotic (amoxicillin or piperacilin). [1][2][3][4][5] Whereas this strategy is effective with the class A b-lactamase inhibitors, there is an urgent need to extend the spectrum of activity to the other classes of serine b-lactamases including the class C enzymes. [6][7][8] Recently, new promising inhibitors of class C b-lactamases such as NXL104, AVE1330A, and diaroylphosphates have been disclosed. [9][10][11] Reports from our laboratories on 6-methylidene penems as mechanism-based inhibitors of serine-reactive class A and C b-lactamases disclosed extensive structure-activity relationships with penems containing monocyclic, [12] [6,5]-bicyclic, [13,14] and [5,5,5]-tricyclic [15,16] heterocycles that adopt the Z configuration at the C6 position.The mode of action of penem inhibitors involves acylation by the catalytic serine residues followed by b-lactam ring opening and a sequence of transformations amounting to a remarkable 7-endo trig rearrangement reaction. Penems 1-3 [16][17][18][19][20][21][22] have been studied by a plethora of methods to establish the formation of the 1,4-dihydrothiazepine acyl-enzyme complex (Figure 1). The complex is stable to hydrolysis because of the displacement of water molecules. However, an issue concerns the absolute stereochemistry of the C7 moiety bearing the heterocyles. In dihydrothiazepine 4 bearing the methyltriazolyl heterocyle, the S-stereochemistry is evidenced by kinetic, [18][19][20] computational, and X-ray crystallographic studies [18,21,22] in class A and C enzymes. The dihydroimidazoA C H T U N G T R E N N U N G [2,1-c]oxazine thiazepine 5 exists as the R-isomer in the crystal structure of both SHV-1 and GC1 enzymes.[13] A novel hydrophobic p-p stacking interaction between the C7 heterocycle with Tyr105 in SHV-1 and Tyr224 in GC1 was revealed. Furthermore, calculated interaction energy differences between C7R and C7S isomers of eight 6-methylidene penems bearing [6,5]-fused bicyclic heterocycles favor the formation of the C7R over the C7S enantiomer in both class A and C enzymes (SHV-1, GC1) respectively. [14] Insights into the binding sites in SHV-1 and GC1 revealed a certain degree of flexibility involving displacement of Tyr105 (SHV-1) and Tyr224 (GC1) residues. In the enzyme complex structure with 5, the hydrophobic p-p stacking interactions with the [6,5]-fused imidazoA C H T U N G T R E N N U N G [2,1-c]oxazine ring was clearly evident, which indeed was the case for the other [6,5]-fused heterocycles that were evaluated by the calculated interaction energy method. [14] The [5,5,5]-tricyclic penem 3 rearranges to thiazepine 6 containing both R and S C7 configurations with 30 % and 70 % crystal occupancy, respectively (Figure 1) as ...