Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems consist of a toxin inhibiting essential cellular functions (such as DNA, RNA and protein synthesis), and its cognate antitoxin neutralizing the toxicity. Recently, we identified a TA system termed TsbA/TsbT in the Staphylococcus aureus genome. The induction of the tsbT gene in Escherichia coli halted both DNA and RNA synthesis, reduced supercoiled plasmid and resulted in increasingly relaxed DNA. These results suggested that DNA gyrase was the target of TsbT. In addition, TsbT inhibited both E. coli and S. aureus DNA gyrase activity and induced linearization of plasmid DNA in vitro. Taken together, these results demonstrate that the TsbT toxin targets DNA gyrase in vivo. Site-directed mutagenesis experiments showed that the E27 and D37 residues in TsbT are critical for toxicity. Secondary structure prediction combining the analysis of vacuum-ultraviolet circular-dichroism spectroscopy and neural network method demonstrated that the 22nd-32nd residues of TsbT form an α-helix structure, and that the E27 residue is located around the centre of the α-helix segment. These findings give new insights not only into S. aureus TA systems, but also into bacterial toxins targeting DNA topoisomerases.
Keywords: DNA gyrase inhibitor; Staphylococcus aureus; secondary structure; site-directed mutagenesis; toxin-antitoxin system.
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