Looks can be deceiving: Bacterial enzymes work through unanticipated mechanism.
Looks can be deceiving: Bacterial enzymes work through unanticipated mechanism.
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外表可能具有欺骗性：细菌酶通过意想不到的机制发挥作用。
DOI：
10.1073/pnas.2114568118
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发表时间：
2021
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Carlson,ErinE
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Shirley,JoshuaD;Carlson,ErinE
直到17世纪安东·范·列文虎克（Anton van Leeuwenhoek）的天才之作，细菌才首次被发现并被理解为地球上的一种“新”生命形式。在接下来的200年里，细菌在很大程度上被忽视了，被认为只是“蛋白质袋”，尽管人们认识到它们可能对人类健康有巨大的影响。现在人们普遍认识到，细菌是一种极其复杂的生物，可以模仿多细胞生物的方式发挥作用（2,3）。细菌细胞不断产生和改造细胞壁的能力也不例外，在上个世纪，人们对这一过程有了无数重要的发现。其中最具开创性的发现之一出现在20世纪40年代，当时发现含有β-内酰胺的分子可以对抗细菌感染。最近，这些药物的靶点，青霉素结合蛋白，以及其他蛋白质机制已经被确定为构建保持这些细胞完整的复杂网状结构的基本要素，肽聚糖（PG）。尽管如此，关于细菌细胞是如何生长和分裂的仍有许多未解之谜。特别是，虽然已知切割和裁剪PG部分的酶在微生物生存中起着重要作用，但对它们的研究还远远不够。Taguchi等人(4)揭示了肺炎链球菌中的两种酶MpgA和MpgB，它们被证明可以切割新生碳水化合物链以释放新合成的PG。
It was not until the ingenious works of Anton van Leeuwenhoek in the 17th century that bacteria were first discovered and understood to be a “new” form of life on Earth (1). For the next 200 y, bacteria were largely ignored and thought to simply be “bags of proteins,” even though it was recognized that they could have enormous impacts on human health. It is now widely appreciated that bacteria are incredibly complex organisms that can function in a manner that mimics a multicellular organism (2, 3). The ability of bacterial cells to constantly produce and remodel their cell wall is no exception to this, and myriad crucial findings about this process have been made over the last century. One of the most seminal of these discoveries came in the1940s when β-lactam− containing molecules were found to combat bacterial infections. More recently, the targets of these drugs, the penicillin-binding proteins, as well as other protein machinery have been identified as essential elements for construction of the complex mesh that keeps these cells intact, the peptidoglycan (PG). Still, many mysteries remain about exactly how bacterial cells grow and divide. In particular, while enzymes that cleave and tailor portions of the PG are known to play important roles in microbial survival, they are dramatically understudied. Taguchi et al.(4) shed light on two enzymes in Streptococcus pneumoniae, MpgA and MpgB, shown to cleave a nascent carbohydrate strand to liberate newly synthesized PG.