Efflux by Small Multidrug Resistance Proteins Is Inhibited by Membrane-interactive Helix-stapled Peptides
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bacterial cell membranes contain several protein pumps that resist the toxic effects of drugs by efficiently extruding them. One family of these pumps, the small multidrug resistance proteins (SMRs), consists of proteins of about 110 residues that need to oligomerize to form a structural pathway for substrate extrusion. As such, SMR oligomerization sites should constitute viable targets for efflux inhibition, by disrupting protein-protein interactions between helical segments. To explore this proposition, we are using Hsmr, an SMR from Halobacter salinarum that dimerizes to extrude toxicants. Our previous work established that (i) Hsmr dimerization is mediated by a helix-helix interface in Hsmr transmembrane (TM) helix 4 (residues (90)GLALIVAGV(98)); and (ii) a peptide comprised of the full TM4(85-105) sequence inhibits Hsmr-mediated ethidium bromide efflux from bacterial cells. Here we define the minimal linear sequence for inhibitor activity (determined as TM4(88-100), and then "staple" this sequence via Grubbs metathesis to produce peptides typified by acetyl-A-(Sar)3-(88)VVGLXLIZXGVVV(100)-KKK-NH2 (X = 2-(4'-pentenyl)alanine at positions 92 and 96; Z = Val, Gly, or Asn at position 95)). The Asn(95) peptide displayed specific efflux inhibition and resensitization of Hsmr-expressing cells to ethidium bromide; and was non-hemolytic to human red blood cells. Stapling essentially prevented peptide degradation in blood plasma and liver homogenates versus an unstapled counterpart. The overall results confirm that the stapled analog of TM4(88-100) retains the structural complementarity required to disrupt the Hsmr TM4-TM4 locus in Hsmr, and portend the general validity of stapled peptides as therapeutics for the disruption of functional protein-protein interactions in membranes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".