XXII. BIOCHEMICKÝ ZJAZD - Jesseniova lekárska fakulta

Posters
74.
THE fUNCTIONal CHaraCTErIZaTION of THE PUTaTIve
MYCOBaCTErial ABC traNSPOrTer MSMEG_6366 - MSMEG_6369
Petronela Dianišková 1 , Jana Korduláková 1 , Henrieta Škovierová 1 , Devinder Kaur 2 ,
Mary Jackson 2 , Patrick J. Brennan 2 and Katarína Mikušová 1
1
Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Comenius University,
Bratislava, Slovakia; 2 Mycobacterial Research Laboratories, Department of
Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, Colorado State University,
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA
The mycobacterial cell envelope differs substantially from the cell walls of other bacteria.
This unique structure accounts for its unusually low permeability and resistance towards
common antibiotics and thus enables mycobacteria to survive and multiply within the
host. The main covalently linked structural element of mycobacterial cell wall consists of
three entities – peptidoglycan, heteropolymeric arabinogalactan and highly hydrophobic
mycolic acids. During the last years a number of enzymes involved in the biosynthesis
of these components have been identified. In spite of this fact, a great challenge is to
decipher the mechanism of the assembly of this complex structure including the transport
of the cell wall intermediates across the plasma membrane. In our effort to identify the
transport proteins that could be involved in this process we focused on a putative ABC
transporter Rv3781-Rv3783 from M. tuberculosis H37Rv. Rv3781 and Rv3783 genes are
located around glfT1, the gene encoding galactosyl transferase responsible for the initiation
of the galactan biosynthesis. Here we demonstrate that orthologs of all three genes are
co-transcribed in M. smegmatis mc 2 155 and we have also confirmed that recombinant
Rv3781 ortholog (MSMEG_6366) and GlfT1 (MSMEG_6367) from M. smegmatis mc 2 155
interact with each other suggesting that they form a complex that could be involved in
the biosynthesis of the cell wall in mycobacteria.
Ackowledgement: This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development
Agency under the contract No. RPEU-0012-06, by European Comission under contract
LSHP-CT-2005-018923”NM4TB“, and by the grant AIDS-FIRCA TW 006487 from NIH, NIAID.
XXII. Biochemistry Congress, Martin
197