Beyond Self-Resistance: ABCF ATPase LmrC Is a Signal-Transducing Component of an Antibiotic-Driven Signaling Cascade Accelerating the Onset of Lincomycin Biosynthesis.

In natural environments, antibiotics are important means of interspecies competition. At subinhibitory concentrations, they act as cues or signals inducing antibiotic production; however, our knowledge of well-documented antibiotic-based sensing systems is limited. Here, for the soil actinobacterium Streptomyces lincolnensis, we describe a fundamentally new ribosome-mediated signaling cascade that accelerates the onset of lincomycin production in response to an external ribosome-targeting antibiotic to synchronize antibiotic production within the population.

Detailed mutational analysis of Vga(A) interdomain linker: implication for antibiotic resistance specificity and mechanism.

Detailed mutational analysis examines the roles of individual residues of the Vga(A) linker in determining the antibiotic resistance phenotype. It defines a narrowed region of residues 212 to 220 whose composition determines the resistance specificity to lincosamides, pleuromutilins, and/or streptogramins A. From the analogy with the recently described function of the homologous ABC-F protein EttA as a translational factor, we infer that the Vga(A) linker interacts with the ribosome and directly or indirectly affects the binding of the respective antibiotic.