Thursday, April 29, 2010

Final Year Project

I’ve been dealing with tetracycline for a while, and here’s a quick overview of what I’ve done.

Basically, I just check for the presence of tet(A) and tet(B) genes, which are involved in tetracycline antibiotics resistance.

Today, while testing out all the Expasy, RasMol, SwissProt etc, I found the structure to the protein encoded by the tet(A) gene.

RasWin

The protein actually pumps in one hydrogen ion into the bacteria, and pumps out one tetracycline antibiotic molecule out into the environment (called the H+/Tetracycline antiporter). You can see the channel as circled lightly in red in the above photo. (Cross Section of the pump)

 

The image below shows the longitudinal section of the pump. You can see that the pump consist of many alpha-helix secondary protein structure.

RasWin

 

Anyways, just to share with everyone about this.

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