Imaging the action of antimicrobial peptides on living bacterial cells.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Gee ML
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3609022 | biostudies-other | 2013
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
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Project description:The bacterial membrane represents an attractive target for the design of new antibiotics to combat widespread bacterial resistance. Understanding how antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and other membrane-active agents attack membranes could facilitate the design of new, effective antimicrobials. Despite intense study of AMPs on model membranes, we do not know how well the mechanism of attack translates to real biological membranes. To that end, we have characterized the attack of AMPs on Escherichia coli cytoplasmic membranes and directly compared this action to model membranes. AMPs induce membrane permeability in E. coli spheroplasts or giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) under well-defined concentrations of AMPs and fluorescent molecules. The action of AMPs on spheroplasts is unique in producing an intracellular fluorescence intensity time curve that increases in a sigmoidal fashion to a steady state. This regular pattern is reproducible by melittin, LL37, and alamethicin but not by CCCP or daptomycin, agents known to cause ion leakage. Remarkably, a similar pattern was also reproduced in GUVs. Indeed the steady-state membrane permeability induced by AMPs is quantitatively the same in spheroplasts and GUVs. There are, however, interesting dissimilarities in details that reveal differences between bacterial and lipid membranes. Spheroplast membranes are permeabilized by a wide range of AMP concentrations to the same steady-state membrane permeability. In contrast, only a narrow range of AMP concentrations permeabilized GUVs to a steady state. Tension in GUVs also influences the action of AMPs, whereas the spheroplast membranes are tensionless. Despite these differences, our results provide a strong support for using model membranes to study the molecular interactions of AMPs with bacterial membranes. As far as we know, this is the first time the actions of AMPs, on bacterial membranes and on model membranes, have been directly and quantitatively compared.
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Project description:More than 40 antimicrobial peptides and proteins (AMPs) are expressed in the oral cavity. These AMPs have been organized into 6 functional groups, 1 of which, cationic AMPs, has received extensive attention in recent years for their promise as potential antibiotics. The goal of this review is to describe recent advances in our understanding of the diverse mechanisms of action of cationic AMPs and the bacterial resistance against these peptides. The recently developed peptide GL13K is used as an example to illustrate many of the discussed concepts. Cationic AMPs typically exhibit an amphipathic conformation, which allows increased interaction with negatively charged bacterial membranes. Peptides undergo changes in conformation and aggregation state in the presence of membranes; conversely, lipid conformation and packing can adapt to the presence of peptides. As a consequence, a single peptide can act through several mechanisms depending on the peptide's structure, the peptide:lipid ratio, and the properties of the lipid membrane. Accumulating evidence shows that in addition to acting at the cell membrane, AMPs may act on the cell wall, inhibit protein folding or enzyme activity, or act intracellularly. Therefore, once a peptide has reached the cell wall, cell membrane, or its internal target, the difference in mechanism of action on gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria may be less pronounced than formerly assumed. While AMPs should not cause widespread resistance due to their preferential attack on the cell membrane, in cases where specific protein targets are involved, the possibility exists for genetic mutations and bacterial resistance. Indeed, the potential clinical use of AMPs has raised the concern that resistance to therapeutic AMPs could be associated with resistance to endogenous host-defense peptides. Current evidence suggests that this is a rare event that can be overcome by subtle structural modifications of an AMP.
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Project description:Studying how antimicrobial peptides interact with bacterial cells is pivotal to understand their mechanism of action. In this paper we explored the use of Circular Dichroism to detect the secondary structure of two antimicrobial peptides, magainin 2 and cecropin A, with E. coli bacterial cells. The results of our studies allow us to gain two important information in the context of antimicrobial peptides- bacterial cells interactions: peptides fold mainly due to interaction with LPS, which is the main component of the Gram negative bacteria outer membrane and the time required for the folding on the bacterial cells depends on the peptide analyzed.
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Project description:Live cell RNA imaging using genetically encoded fluorescent labels is an important tool for monitoring RNA activities. A recently reported RNA aptamer-fluorogen system, the Spinach, in which an RNA aptamer binds and induces the fluorescence of a GFP-like 3,5-difluoro-4-hydroxybenzylidene imidazolinone (DFHBI) ligand, can be readily tagged to the RNA of interest. Although the aptamer-fluorogen system is sufficient for imaging highly abundant non-coding RNAs (tRNAs, rRNAs, etc.), it performs poorly for mRNA imaging due to low brightness. In addition, whether the aptamer-fluorogen system may perturb the native RNA characteristics has not been systematically characterized at the levels of RNA transcription, translation and degradation. To increase the brightness of these aptamer-fluorogen systems, we constructed and tested tandem arrays containing multiple Spinach aptamers (8-64 aptamer repeats). Such arrays enhanced the brightness of the tagged mRNA molecules by up to ~17 fold in living cells. Strong laser excitation with pulsed illumination further increased the imaging sensitivity of Spinach array-tagged RNAs. Moreover, transcriptional fusion to the Spinach array did not affect mRNA transcription, translation or degradation, indicating that aptamer arrays might be a generalizable labeling method for high-performance and low-perturbation live cell RNA imaging.
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Project description:The management of bacterial infections is becoming a major clinical challenge due to the rapid evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. As an excellent candidate to overcome antibiotic resistance, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) that are produced from the synthetic and natural sources demonstrate a broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity with the high specificity and low toxicity. These peptides possess distinctive structures and functions by employing sophisticated mechanisms of action. This comprehensive review provides a broad overview of AMPs from the origin, structural characteristics, mechanisms of action, biological activities to clinical applications. We finally discuss the strategies to optimize and develop AMP-based treatment as the potential antimicrobial and anticancer therapeutics.
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Project description:The innate immune system plays a critical role in the defense of areas exposed to microorganisms. There is an increasing body of evidence indicating that antimicrobial peptides and proteins (APs) are one of the most important weapons of this system and that they make up the protective front for the respiratory tract. On the other hand, it is known that pathogenic organisms have developed countermeasures to resist these agents such as reducing the net negative charge of the bacterial membranes. Here we report the characterization of a novel mechanism of resistance to APs that is dependent on the bacterial capsule polysaccharide (CPS). Klebsiella pneumoniae CPS mutant was more sensitive than the wild type to human neutrophil defensin 1, beta-defensin 1, lactoferrin, protamine sulfate, and polymyxin B. K. pneumoniae lipopolysaccharide O antigen did not play an important role in AP resistance, and CPS was the only factor conferring protection against polymyxin B in strains lacking O antigen. In addition, we found a significant correlation between the amount of CPS expressed by a given strain and the resistance to polymyxin B. We also showed that K. pneumoniae CPS mutant bound more polymyxin B than the wild-type strain with a concomitant increased in the self-promoted pathway. Taken together, our results suggest that CPS protects bacteria by limiting the interaction of APs with the surface. Finally, we report that K. pneumoniae increased the amount of CPS and upregulated cps transcription when grown in the presence of polymyxin B and lactoferrin.
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Project description:We investigated the phenomena of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) directly attacking the cytoplasmic membranes of Escherichia coli spheroplasts. We developed a procedure for fluorescence recovery after photobleaching to examine dye leakage through bacterial membranes as AMPs in solution bound to the membranes. We found that the AMP binding did not increase the apparent membrane area of a spheroplast, contrary to the response of a lipid-bilayer vesicle, which always showed a membrane area expansion by AMP binding. The permeability through the bacterial membrane increased in a sigmoidal fashion as the AMP binding increased in time, exhibiting a cooperative behavior of AMPs. The analysis of fluorescence recovery after photobleaching showed that the fluxes of dye molecules into and out of the cell were consistent with diffusion of molecules through a number of pores that increased with binding of AMPs and then saturated to a steady level. We discovered a new, to our knowledge, experimental parameter called the flux rate that characterizes the AMP-induced permeability of dye molecules through bacterial membranes. The phenomena observed in bacterial membranes are consistent with the pore-forming activities of AMPs previously observed in lipid bilayers. The experimental value of the flux rate per pore is much smaller than a theoretical value that assumes no friction for the dye molecule's permeation through the pore. We believe that experimental studies of the flux rate will be useful for further analysis of AMPs' permeabilization mechanisms.
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Project description:This SuperSeries is composed of the SubSeries listed below.
2018-09-15 | GSE113347 | GEO