Waste or die: The price to pay to stay alive.

Cédric Orelle, Lutz Schmitt, Jean-Michel Jault

Journal: Trends in microbiology 2023;31(3):233-241

PMID: 36192292

Full Text on Elsevier Science View on PubMed

Abstract

Microorganisms need to constantly exchange with their habitat to capture nutrients and expel toxic compounds. The ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters, a family of membrane proteins especially abundant in microorganisms, are at the core of these processes. Due to their extraordinary ability to expel structurally unrelated compounds, some transporters play a protective role in different organisms. Yet, the downside of these multidrug transporters is their entanglement in the resistance to therapeutic treatments. Intriguingly, some multidrug ABC transporters show a high level of ATPase activity, even in the absence of transported substrates. Although this basal ATPase activity might seem a waste, we surmise that this inherent capacity allows multidrug transporters to promptly translocate any bound drug before it penetrates into the cell.

Address: University of Lyon, CNRS, UMR5086 'Molecular Microbiology and Structural Biochemistry', IBCP, 7 Passage du Vercors, F-69367, Lyon, France. Electronic address: [email protected].; Institute of Biochemistry, Heinrich Heine University, Universitätsstrasse 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany. Electronic address: [email protected].; University of Lyon, CNRS, UMR5086 'Molecular Microbiology and Structural Biochemistry', IBCP, 7 Passage du Vercors, F-69367, Lyon, France. Electronic address: [email protected].

DOI: 10.1016/j.tim.2022.09.005

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MeSH Terms: ATP-Binding Cassette Transporters, Membrane Transport Proteins, Adenosine Triphosphatases