Engineering an allosteric binding site for aminoglycosides into TEM1-β-Lactamase

Can We Exploit β-Lactamases Intrinsic Dynamics for Designing More Effective Inhibitors?

β-lactamases (BLs) represent the most frequent cause of antimicrobial resistance in Gram-negative bacteria. Despite the continuous efforts in the development of BL inhibitors (BLIs), new BLs able to hydrolyze the last developed antibiotics rapidly emerge. Moreover, the insurgence rate of effective mutations is far higher than the release of BLIs able to counteract them. This results in a shortage of antibiotics that is menacing the effective treating of infectious diseases. The situation is made even worse by the co-expression in bacteria of BLs with different mechanisms and hydrolysis spectra, and by the lack of inhibitors able to hit them all. Differently from other targets, BL flexibility has not been deeply exploited for drug design, possibly because of the small protein size, for their apparent rigidity and their high fold conservation. In this mini-review, we discuss the evidence for BL binding site dynamics being crucial for catalytic efficiency, mutation effect, and for the design of new inhibitors. Then, we report on identified allosteric sites in BLs and on possible allosteric inhibitors, as a strategy to overcome the frequent occurrence of mutations in BLs and the difficulty of competing efficaciously with substrates. Nevertheless, allosteric inhibitors could work synergistically with traditional inhibitors, increasing the chances of restoring bacterial susceptibility towards available antibiotics.

Crystallization and preliminary X-ray diffraction analysis of kanamycin-binding β-lactamase in complex with its ligand

TEM-1 β-lactamase is a highly efficient enzyme that is involved in bacterial resistance against β-lactam antibiotics such as penicillin. It is also a robust scaffold protein which can be engineered by molecular-evolution techniques to bind a variety of targets. One such β-lactamase variant (BlaKr) has been constructed to bind kanamycin (kan) and other aminoglycoside antibiotics, which are neither substrates nor ligands of native β-lactamases. In addition to recognizing kan, BlaKr activity is up-regulated by its binding via an activation mechanism which is not yet understood at the molecular level. In order to fill this gap, determination of the structure of the BlaKr-kan complex was embarked upon. A crystallization condition for BlaKr-kan was identified using high-throughput screening, and crystal growth was further optimized using streak-seeding and hanging-drop methods. The crystals belonged to the orthorhombic space group P2(1)2(1)2(1), with unit-cell parameters a = 47.01, b = 72.33, c = 74.62 Å, and diffracted to 1.67 Å resolution using synchrotron radiation. The X-ray structure of BlaKr with its ligand kanamycin should provide the molecular-level details necessary for understanding the activation mechanism of the engineered enzyme.