May Offer Target for Antibiotic Design and Insights Into Evolution of Life
Oxygen is poison to some disease-causing bacteria. For years, scientists have wondered how bacteria that grow in the absence of oxygen (called "anaerobes") are able to sense oxygen in their environment and swim away from it to avoid death. Now, they have identified an unusual protein that may explain how they do this. The protein could also offer a potential target for the design of new antibiotics and provide insight into the evolution of life, they say.
The finding is described in the May 16 issue of Biochemistry, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.
"We propose that, since this bacterium is poisoned by air, [the protein's] oxygen-binding domain senses when oxygen is present in the environment and causes the bacteria to swim away from it," says Donald M. Kurtz, Jr., Ph.D., the principal investigator of the study and a professor of chemistry at the University of Georgia, located in Athens, Ga.
He continues, "We suspect that this system may be a general oxygen-sensor in anaerobic microorganisms."
Some anaerobic bacteria can cause human diseases such as gingivitis (gum disease) and gangrene. If Kurtz is correct, his finding could lead to development of new antibiotics.
Since the initial finding, the researchers have identified similar proteins in 12 different bacteria, evenly distributed between anaerobic and aerobic (able to use oxygen). Although many disease-causing bacteria are aerobic, some are able to grow anaerobically as well. If they, too, contain this protein, they could also be vulnerable to drugs that inactivate it, says Kurtz.
Such drugs could provide a new weapon to fight the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, in which bacteria that are normally killed by drugs become resistant to them, he says.
The researchers made their initial discovery while searching gene an
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Contact: Beverly Hassell
b_hassell@acs.org
202-872-4065
American Chemical Society
3-May-2000