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Infection and Immunity, August 2000, p. 4773-4777, Vol. 68, No. 8
Department of
Biochemistry1 and Oral Health Science
Center,2 Tokyo Dental College, Mihama-ku,
Chiba City 261-8502, and Department of Oral Biochemistry,
School of Dentistry, Tohoku University, Aoba-ku, Sendai City
980-8575,3 Japan
Received 10 January 2000/Returned for modification 6 March
2000/Accepted 26 April 2000
The act gene was identified and an act
mutant as well as the pfl mutant was constructed in
Streptococcus mutans. Pyruvate formate-lyase (PFL) activity
was regenerated with the mixture of the respective cell extracts from
these mutants by complementary reconstitution of the in vitro
reactivating system. The S. mutans act gene encoded the
sole enzyme able to activate the PFL protein in this organism.
Streptococcus mutans has
been implicated as an important microbial agent in human dental caries
(13). The regulation of acid production in this organism
inhabiting dental plaque on tooth surfaces has been of particular
interest because the resulting acid fermentation products from dietary
sugars can demineralize the enamel tooth surfaces, resulting in dental caries.
In the natural environment of this organism, such as the interior of
dental plaque, where anaerobic conditions exist, pyruvate formate-lyase
(PFL) may play a more important role than lactate dehydrogenase (LDH)
in pyruvate metabolism as a part of ATP synthesis and NAD+
and/or NADH recycling (2, 6, 27, 28). In addition, PFL of
this organism is essential for anaerobic metabolism of sugar alcohols
(e.g., sorbitol and mannitol) used as sweeteners for dental caries
prevention (27). S. mutans produces various fermentation end products, including formate, acetate, and ethanol as
well as lactic acid (27). Investigations of the
enzymatically regulatory mechanisms controlling the production of
fermentation end products have revealed that PFL plays a central role
in fermentation in S. mutans (1, 2, 27).
Therefore, this regulatory mechanism should be elucidated at the
molecular level in this organism.
The Escherichia coli PFL has been identified as an enzyme
containing a glycyl radical in its active structure (7, 8, 16, 22,
24) and can be converted from the reversibly inactive form to the
active form by the PFL-activating enzyme, PFL activase (9, 10, 16,
23). The S. mutans PFL was also reported to be
extremely dioxygen sensitive (2, 20, 29). We have cloned the
S. mutans pfl gene encoding PFL (30), and the
deduced amino acid sequence contains the putative glycyl radical at a similar position relative to the E. coli enzyme. Therefore,
it is possible that S. mutans PFL could be activated by PFL
activase or an equivalent enzyme.
In the present investigation, an act gene encoding PFL
activase from S. mutans was cloned by PCR amplification. We
describe the sequence analysis of the S. mutans act gene and
present evidence that it is involved in the regulation of PFL.
Cloning and sequence analysis of the S. mutans act
gene.
To isolate the act gene of S. mutans,
we performed PCR amplification of an act internal region
from S. mutans GS-5IS3 (30) chromosomal DNA. A
425-bp fragment was amplified by PCR using synthesized oligonucleotide
primer sets consisting of act5'2 (5' TATTGCCATAATCCGGAYACNTGG 3'
[forward]) and act3'3 (5' GGAACCAAGACATRKCKDATCCA 3' [reverse])
based upon the sequence of the act sequence of E. coli (14), Clostridium pasteurianum
(25), and a putative act sequence of
Streptococcus pyogenes (The University of Oklahoma's Advanced Center for Genome Technology [http://
www.genome.ou.edu/strep.html]). The three nucleotides at the
3' ends of act5'2 and act3'3 were designed according to the unique
tryptophan codon UGG. The nucleotide sequence of the 425-bp amplicon
was determined and indicated that this amplicon was very likely a part
of the act gene of S. mutans because of its
similarity to the act genes from other organisms. To obtain
the fragments upstream and downstream from the amplified act
internal region, inverse PCR was carried out by using genome walking
libraries of this organism. The nucleotide sequence of the 1.5-kb
ScaI-HindIII region encompassing the entire
S. mutans act gene region was then determined (accession
number AB018417 [http://www.genome.ou.edu/strep.html]) by an
automated DNA sequencer (model 373S; PE Biosystems, Foster City,
Calif.). Nucleotide sequence analysis was carried out with the
DNASIS-Mac program (Hitachi Software Engineering, Yokohama, Japan). The
789-bp open reading frame (ORF) encodes a 263-amino-acid protein with a
calculated molecular weight of 30,148. A potential ribosome-binding
sequence (AGGA) and a promoter-like sequence
(TAGTCT-N18-TATAAT) could be identified immediately
upstream from the putative initiation codon of the act gene.
An inverted repeat sequence characteristic of transcription terminator
could also be detected 11 bp downstream from the termination codon of
the act gene. The formation of a putative stem-loop
structure in this region of the mRNA corresponds to a free-energy
change of 8.4 kJ per mol. Although random mutagenesis to isolate the
act gene was initially attempted as previously reported for
isolation of the pfl gene (30), act
mutants were not isolated by this procedure. In fact, only one
Sau3AI fragment capable of gene inactivation by this
mutagenesis was detected, corresponding to a size of 156 bp based upon
subsequent sequencing of the S. mutans act region. This size
may have been too small for multiple integrational inactivations.
0019-9567/00/$04.00+0
Copyright © 2000, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Characterization of the Streptococcus
mutans Pyruvate Formate-Lyase (PFL)-Activating Enzyme Gene by
Complementary Reconstitution of the In Vitro PFL-Reactivating
System
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ABSTRACT
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TEXT
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Characterization of the S. mutans act gene.
To
confirm the function of the act gene, we constructed the
S. mutans act mutant (YASC9YK2) by insertional inactivation
with a suicide vector containing the tetracycline-resistant gene,
following the transformation procedure routinely used in this
laboratory (15, 30). The S. mutans act-5'orf
mutant (YASCXYGEmr1) was also constructed by the same
procedure with the erythromycin-resistant gene to determine whether or
not the protein coded by act-5'orf gene is involved in
pyruvate metabolism or its regulation. The predicted insertion of the
vectors into the chromosome of parental strain (S. mutans
GS-5IS3) was confirmed by Southern hybridization analysis (data not
shown). The PFL and LDH activities with cell extracts from the parental
strain and its mutants (act mutant:YASC9YK2; pfl
mutant:SAKC5Y2C1 (30); act-5'orf
mutant:YASCXYGEmr1) were spectrophotometrically determined
by recording the change in absorbance at 340 nm. The parental strain
was grown in medium D87M containing 1% glucose as carbon source
(D87M-Glu). The act and pfl mutants and the
act-5'orf mutant were grown in D87M-Glu containing 3 µg of
tetracycline per ml and 10 µg of erythromycin per ml, respectively.
Preparation of cell extracts from these cells at the earlier stages of
the exponential growth phase and enzyme assays was performed throughout
under strictly anaerobic conditions in a specially designed anaerobic
chamber as described previously (2, 20, 21). This was
necessary since the S. mutans PFL is very likely a glycyl
radical enzyme that can be converted from the reversibly inactive form
(R form) to the active form (A form) by PFL activase as indicated in
Fig. 2 and also because the A form has
been reported to be extremely dioxygen sensitive (2, 20, 27,
29). The protein concentrations in the cell extracts were
determined by the biuret method (12). The PFL activities
were not detected in the cell extracts from either act or
pfl mutants, while the activities (2.11 ± 0.44 and 2.12 µmol/min/mg of protein) were almost identical in the extracts from the parental strain and the act-5'orf mutant (Table
1). Moreover, we did not detect formate
as a fermentation end product in supernatants from the anaerobic
cultures of both the act and pfl mutants by
assaying as described previously (data not shown) (20). The
LDH activities of the mutants were similar to that of the parental
strain (Table 1). Inactivation of the act-5'orf gene did not
induce any phenotypic changes concerning pyruvate metabolism, e.g.,
formate production, lactate production, and growth with various sugars.
These results apparently indicate that the act mutant was
not able to generate the A form of PFL and the act-5'orf is
not involved in pyruvate metabolism.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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We thank T. Yamada (School of Dentistry, Tohoku University) and H. K. Kuramitsu (State University of New York at Buffalo) for critical reading of the manuscript, Y. Yamashita (School of Dentistry, Kyushu University) and M. Kitamura (Himeji Institute of Technology) for their helpful comments, and Y. Mito (School of Dentistry, Tohoku University) and A. Gokan (Tokyo Dental College) for their kind assistance.
This investigation was supported in part by grants-in-aid for Encouragement of Young Scientists (no. 07771676, 08771623, and 09771547 to Y. Yamamoto) from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sports and a grant-in-aid for Research supported by Tokyo Dental College.
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FOOTNOTES |
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* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Biochemistry, Tokyo Dental College, Masago 1-2-2, Mihama-ku, Chiba City 261-8502, Japan. Phone: 81-43-270-3750. Fax: 81-43-270-3752. E-mail: yayamamo{at}tdc.ac.jp.
Editor: V. J. DiRita
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