Vietnamese PhD Student Explains Mechanism of Antibiotic Resistance
September 2, 2011| |
Scientists have been investigating how an antibiotic-producing organism controls resistance to its own antibiotic. At the John Innes Centre, Vietnamese PhD student Tung Le and other scientists are investigating the production of antibiotic simocyclinone, which comes from Streptomyces antibioticus, and the pumping mechanism that transports the antibiotic from the cell.
Under the supervision of Mark Buttner, Tung found out that SimR, the protein used by S. antibioticus to control antibiotic export, can bind either to DNA or to the antibiotic itself, but not to both. Therefore, when the antibiotic is present, SimR releases the DNA, which leads to the expression of a gene that encodes a pump responsible for removing the antibiotic from the cell.
"This provides a mechanism that couples the potentially lethal biosynthesis of the antibiotic to its export, which has wider implications for resistance to clinically important antibiotics," commented Prof. Buttner. "However, we needed to know more detail about the interaction between SimR and DNA."
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