Divide and conquer: processive transport enables multidrug transporters to tackle challenging drugs
Authors:Nir Fluman and Eitan Bibi
Department of Biological Chemistry, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel 76100.
Keywords:
multidrug resistance, multidrug transport, MdfA, dequalinium, antibiotics, secondary transport, drug-proton exchange.
Related Article(s)?
Fluman N, Adler J, Rotenberg SA, Brown MH, Bibi E. (2014). Export of a single drug molecule in two transport cycles by a multidrug efflux pump. Nat Commun. 5:4615. , 10.1038/ncomms5615
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
None.
Please cite this article as:
Nir Fluman and Eitan Bibi (2014). Divide and conquer: processive transport enables multidrug transporters to tackle challenging drugs. Microbial Cell 1(10): 349-351.
© 2014 Fluman and Bibi. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.
Abstract:
Multidrug transporters are membrane proteins that catalyze efflux of antibiotics and other toxic compounds from cells, thereby conferring drug resistance on various organisms. Unlike most solute transporters that transport a single type of compound or similar analogues, multidrug transporters are extremely promiscuous. They transport a broad spectrum of dissimilar drugs and represent a serious obstacle to antimicrobial or anticancer chemotherapy. Many challenging aspects of multidrug transporters, which are unique, have been studied in detail, including their ability to interact with chemically unrelated drugs, and how they utilize energy to drive efflux of compounds that are not only structurally but electrically different. A new and surprising dimension of the promiscuous nature of multidrug transporters has been described recently: they can move long molecules through the membrane in a processive manner.
doi: 10.15698/mic2014.10.172
Volume 1, pp. 349 to 351, published 23/09/2014.