Molecular mechanism of the enterococcal aminoglycoside 6'-N-acetyltransferase': role of GNAT-conserved residues in the chemistry of antibiotic inactivation.

The Gram-positive pathogen Enterococcus faecium is intrinsically resistant to aminoglycoside antibiotics due to the presence of a chromosomally encoded aminoglycoside 6'-N-acetyltransferase [AAC(6')-Ii]. This enzyme is a member of the GCN5-related N-acetyltransferase (GNAT) superfamily and is therefore structurally homologous to proteins that catalyze acetyl transfer to diverse acyl-accepting substrates. This study reports the investigation of several potential catalytic residues that are present in the AAC(6')-Ii active site and also conserved in many GNAT enzymes.

Kinetic mechanism of the GCN5-related chromosomal aminoglycoside acetyltransferase AAC(6')-Ii from Enterococcus faecium: evidence of dimer subunit cooperativity.

The aminoglycoside 6'-N-acetyltransferase AAC(6')-Ii from Enterococcus faecium is an important microbial resistance determinant and a member of the GCN5-related N-acetyltransferase (GNAT) superfamily. We report here the further characterization of this enzyme in terms of the kinetic mechanism of acetyl transfer and identification of rate-contributing step(s) in catalysis, as well as investigations into the binding of both acetyl-CoA and aminoglycoside substrates to the AAC(6')-Ii dimer. Product and dead-end inhibition studies revealed that AAC(6')-Ii follows an ordered bi-bi ternary complex mechanism with acetyl-CoA binding first followed by antibiotic.

Functional annotation of putative aminoglycoside antibiotic modifying proteins in Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv.

The growing availability of sequences of bacterial genomes has revealed a number of open reading frames predicted by sequence alignment to encode antibiotic resistance proteins. The presence of these putative resistance genes within bacterial genomes raises important questions regarding potential reservoirs of resistance elements and their evolution. Here we examine four gene products encoding predicted aminoglycoside-aminocyclitol antibiotic modifying enzymes, two phosphotransferases and two acetyltransferases, derived from analysis of the genome sequence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strain H37Rv with the goal of assigning biochemical function by purification of each protein and characterization of their ability to modify aminoglycoside antibiotics.

Broad-spectrum peptide inhibitors of aminoglycoside antibiotic resistance enzymes.

The action of aminoglycoside antibiotics is inhibited by chemical modification catalyzed by aminoglycoside inactivating enzymes, which bind these cationic saccharides with active site pockets that contain a preponderance of negatively charged residues. In this study, it was observed that several cationic antimicrobial peptides, representing different structural classes, could serve as inhibitors of such aminoglycoside resistance enzymes. The bovine antimicrobial peptide indolicidin and synthetic analogs appeared to be especially effective against a range of resistance enzymes, inhibiting enzymes belonging to both aminoglycoside phosphotransferase and aminoglycoside acetyltransferase classes, where the mode of action was dependent on the class of antibiotic resistance enzyme.