Arsinothricin, an arsenic-containing non-proteinogenic amino acid analog of glutamate, is a broad-spectrum antibiotic

The emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance highlights the urgent need for new antibiotics. Organoarsenicals have been used as antimicrobials since Paul Ehrlich’s salvarsan. Recently a soil bacterium was shown to produce the organoarsenical arsinothricin. We demonstrate that arsinothricin,...

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Veröffentlicht in:Communications biology 2019-04, Vol.2 (1), p.131, Article 131
Hauptverfasser: Nadar, Venkadesh Sarkarai, Chen, Jian, Dheeman, Dharmendra S., Galván, Adriana Emilce, Yoshinaga-Sakurai, Kunie, Kandavelu, Palani, Sankaran, Banumathi, Kuramata, Masato, Ishikawa, Satoru, Rosen, Barry P., Yoshinaga, Masafumi
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Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:The emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance highlights the urgent need for new antibiotics. Organoarsenicals have been used as antimicrobials since Paul Ehrlich’s salvarsan. Recently a soil bacterium was shown to produce the organoarsenical arsinothricin. We demonstrate that arsinothricin, a non-proteinogenic analog of glutamate that inhibits glutamine synthetase, is an effective broad-spectrum antibiotic against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, suggesting that bacteria have evolved the ability to utilize the pervasive environmental toxic metalloid arsenic to produce a potent antimicrobial. With every new antibiotic, resistance inevitably arises. The arsN1 gene, widely distributed in bacterial arsenic resistance ( ars ) operons, selectively confers resistance to arsinothricin by acetylation of the α-amino group. Crystal structures of ArsN1 N -acetyltransferase, with or without arsinothricin, shed light on the mechanism of its substrate selectivity. These findings have the potential for development of a new class of organoarsenical antimicrobials and ArsN1 inhibitors. Nadar, Chen, Dheeman et al. show that arsinothricin, an arsenic-containing non- proteinogenic amino acid analog of glutamate, is an effective broad-spectrum antibiotic through inhibition of glutamine synthetase. This study suggests a possibility of developing a new class of antimicrobials that thwart microbial resistance to arsinothricin.
ISSN:2399-3642
2399-3642
DOI:10.1038/s42003-019-0365-y