Abstract
The rapid increase of antibiotic resistance has created an urgent need to develop novel antimicrobial agents. Here we describe the crystal structure of the promising bacterial target phospho-N-acetylmuramoyl–pentapeptide translocase (MraY) in complex with the nucleoside antibiotic tunicamycin. The structure not only reveals the mode of action of several related natural-product antibiotics but also gives an indication on the binding mode of the MraY UDP–MurNAc–pentapeptide and undecaprenyl-phosphate substrates.
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Acknowledgements
We thank A. Shapiro and J. Bernström for assistance with activity measurements, beamline scientists at ESRF (Grenoble, France) and Diamond Light Source (Didcot, UK) for assistance during data collection, and members of Global Phasing Ltd. for help with STARANISO. We are also grateful to I. Moraes at the Membrane Protein Laboratory, Diamond for providing beamtime and assistance. This work was supported by the European Union under the programme FP7-PEOPLE-2011-ITN NanoMem, project number 317079 (M.E.) and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie agreement No 637295, X-probe (M.E.).
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A.S. and M.E. designed the study, J.K.H. established purification and crystallized the protein, J.H. collected and analyzed the activity data, J.K.H. and P.J. collected the crystallographic data, P.J. solved and built the initial model, P.J. and G.B. refined the structure, H.C. performed the docking studies, J.K.H., G.B., M.E. and P.J. prepared the manuscript with input from all authors.
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J.H., H.C., A.S., M.E. and P.J. are employees of AstraZeneca.
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Hakulinen, J., Hering, J., Brändén, G. et al. MraY–antibiotic complex reveals details of tunicamycin mode of action. Nat Chem Biol 13, 265–267 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2270
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2270
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