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AbstractFengycin is a lipopeptide which exhibits a broad spectrum of antifungal activity. Previous studies have shown that fengycin peptide consists of 10 amino acids and is synthesized nonribosomally by peptide synthetases. These peptide synthetases can bind to and activate specific amino acids. These activated amino acids are then linked together by the action of the enzymes to form the fengycin peptide. The purpose of this study was to characterize the gene, fenA, which encodes the peptide synthetase, FenA. Sequencing analysis revealed that fenA has a length of 10,513 bp and encodes a peptide synthetase, FenA which can activate three amino acids. Each of the three amino acid activation modules (FenAA, FenAB, FenAC) of FenA contains conserved spacer, ATP-binding, ATPase, and pantetheinin-binding domains. The sequence similarities between FenAA and the SrfAC module of surfactin synthetase, FenAB and the TyrA module of tyrocidine synthetase, FenAC and the GrsA module of gramicidin S synthetase are 32.8%, 33.7%, and 34.9%, respectively. I have also cloned and overexpressed the fenAC module of fenA in Escherichia coli. The expressed protein was purified by His-tag affinity chromatography. The purified protein was incubated with one of the twenty amino acids in a reaction mixture containing [32P]sodium pyrophosphate and ATP. Results showed that only alanine was able to promote the pyrophosphate exchange between sodium pyrophosphate and ATP, indicating that the function of FenAC is responsible for the activation of alanine. Studies reported by other laboratory showed that the last amino acid activation module of all the peptide synthetases studied so far consists of a racemase domain, indicating that this domain is required not only for the conversion of L-amino acid to D-amino acid but also for the translocation of the peptide translocation from one enzyme to the other enzyme. I found that a conserved racemase region is also present at the end of FenAC, showing that FenAC is the last module of FenA synthetase. I have also determined the locations of the seven Tn917lux insertions in fenA and analyzed the expression of fenA by monitoring the luciferase activity exhibited by two of the Tn917lux mutants, FS22 and FS24. Results showed that the luciferase was expressed during the stationary phase, suggesting that the promoter which transcribes fenA is activated during the stationary phase. Since it is possible to generate artificial peptide synthetases consisting of different amino acid modules for the synthesis of a specific peptide, the understanding of the structure and the function of fenA will help us to achieve this goal.
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