Phylogenomic Analysis of β-Lactamase in Archaea and Bacteria Enables the Identification of Putative New Members

Genome Biol Evol. 2018 Apr 1;10(4):1106-1114. doi: 10.1093/gbe/evy028.

Abstract

β-lactamases are enzymes which are commonly produced by bacteria and which degrade the β-lactam ring of β-lactam antibiotics, namely penicillins, cephalosporins, carbapenems, and monobactams, and inactivate these antibiotics. We performed a rational and comprehensive investigation of β-lactamases in different biological databases. In this study, we constructed hidden Markov model profiles as well as the ancestral sequence of four classes of β-lactamases (A, B, C, and D), which were used to identify potential β-lactamases from environmental metagenomic (1206), human microbiome metagenomic (6417), human microbiome reference genome (1310), and NCBI's nonredundant databases (44101). Our analysis revealed the existence of putative β-lactamases in the metagenomic databases, which appeared to be similar to the four different molecular classes (A-D). This is the first report on the large-scale phylogenetic diversity of new members of β-lactamases, and our results revealed that metagenomic database dark-matter contains β-lactamase-like antibiotic resistance genes.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Anti-Bacterial Agents / adverse effects
  • Anti-Bacterial Agents / therapeutic use
  • Archaea / enzymology
  • Bacteria / enzymology
  • Carbapenems / biosynthesis*
  • Carbapenems / chemistry
  • Humans
  • Metagenomics
  • Phylogeny*
  • beta-Lactamases / genetics*
  • beta-Lactams / metabolism*

Substances

  • Anti-Bacterial Agents
  • Carbapenems
  • beta-Lactams
  • beta-Lactamases