Abstract
Antibiotic-resistant microorganisms causing a life-threatening infection pose a serious challenge for modern science. The rapidly growing number of incidents for which the use of standard antibiotics is ineffective forces us to develop new alternative methods of killing microorganisms. Antimicrobial proteins and peptides (AMPs) can be promising candidates to solve this problem. Colicin-M is one of the representatives of this group and is naturally produced by Escherichia coli acting on other closely related bacterial strains by disrupting their outer cell membrane. This bacteriocin has huge potential as a potent antimicrobial agent, especially, since it was recognized by the FDA as safe. In this work, we present the expression of colicin M in model transgenic Nicotiana tabacum L. plants. We demonstrate that purified colicin retains its antibacterial activity against the control Escherichia coli strains and clinical isolates of Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Our results also show that plant-derived ColM is not toxic for L929 and HeLa cell line, which allows us to suppose that plant-based expression could be an alternative production method of such important proteins.
Highlights
In the twentieth century, antibiotics fundamentally changed the way of dealing with bacterial infections
Genomic DNA was isolated from transgenic (Fig. 1) and control tobacco plants to analyze the presence of a colicin M coding sequence at the genomic level by the PCR amplification using primers specific for colicin
The results showed that the majority of control E. coli strains, except for the genetically modified (GM) strain, were sensitive to colicin M, but it was inactive against P. aeruginosa in the concentrations analyzed
Summary
Antibiotics fundamentally changed the way of dealing with bacterial infections. Together with the beginning of the twenty-first century, voices reporting the end of the antibiotics era became more prevalent (Kåhrström 2013; Fowler et al 2014). The gene of resistance to colistin, a last-resort antibiotic against resistant E. coli, has been found both in meat samples and in human infections, in China and in India, and is reported to move freely between bacteria (Liu et al 2016; Paveenkittiporn et al 2017; Chen et al 2017). The situation is difficult given the fact that a similar problem occurred in case of the fast spread of resistance to carbapenems, a previous last-resort antibiotic, which are reported to
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