Genereux, Catherine[Université de Liège - ULg > Département des maladies infectieuses et parasitaires > Parasitologie et pathologie des maladies parasitaires >]
Dehareng, Dominique[Université de Liège - ULg > > Centre d'ingénierie des protéines >]
Joris, Bernard[Université de Liège - ULg > > Centre d'ingénierie des protéines >]
[en] AmpD is a bacterial amidase involved in the recycling of cell-wall fragments in Gram-negative bacteria. Inactivation of AmpD leads to derepression of beta-lactamase expression, presenting a major pathway for the acquisition of constitutive antibiotic resistance. Here, we report the NMR structure of AmpD from Citrobacter freundii (PDB accession code 1J3G). A deep substrate-binding pocket explains the observed specificity for low molecular mass substrates. The fold is related to that of bacteriophage T7 lysozyme. Both proteins bind zinc at a conserved site and require zinc for amidase activity, although the enzymatic mechanism seems to differ in detail. The structure-based sequence alignment identifies conserved features that are also conserved in the eukaryotic peptidoglycan recognition protein (PGRP) domains, including the zinc-coordination site in several of them. PGRP domains thus belong to the same fold family and, where zinc-binding residues are conserved, may have amidase activity. This hypothesis is supported by the observation that human serum N-acetylmuramyl-L-alanine amidase seems to be identical with a soluble form of human PGRP-L. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics Karolinska Institute, Stockholm ; Center for Protein Engineering, Liege University ; Research School of Chemistry Australian National University Canberra
Politique Scientifique Fédérale (Belgique) = Belgian Federal Science Policy ; Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (Communauté française de Belgique) - F.R.S.-FNRS ; Fonds pour la formation à la Recherche dans l'Industrie et dans l'Agriculture (Communauté française de Belgique) - FRIA ; Swedish Council ; Swedish NMR Centre
[Université de Liège - ULg > Département des maladies infectieuses et parasitaires > Parasitologie et pathologie des maladies parasitaires >]
