Essentiality Assessment of Cysteinyl and Lysyl-tRNA Synthetases of Mycobacterium smegmatis.

ABSTRACT: Discovery of mupirocin, an antibiotic that targets isoleucyl-tRNA synthetase, established aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase as an attractive target for the discovery of novel antibacterial agents. Despite a high degree of similarity between the bacterial and human aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, the selectivity observed with mupirocin triggered the possibility of targeting other aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases as potential drug targets. These enzymes catalyse the condensation of a specific amino acid to its cognate tRNA in an energy-dependent reaction. Therefore, each organism is expected to encode at least twenty aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, one for each amino acid. However, a bioinformatics search for genes encoding aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases from Mycobacterium smegmatis returned multiple genes for glutam

SUBMITTER: Ravishankar S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4721953 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature