Multiplex de novo sequencing of peptide antibiotics

  • Authors:
  • Hosein Mohimani;Wei-Ting Liu;Yu-Liang Yang;Susana P. Gaudêncio;William Fenical;Pieter C. Dorrestein;Pavel A. Pevzner

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego;Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC San Diego;Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, UC San Diego;Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego;Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego;Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC San Diego and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, UC San Diego;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego

  • Venue:
  • RECOMB'11 Proceedings of the 15th Annual international conference on Research in computational molecular biology
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Proliferation of drug-resistant diseases raises the challenge of searching for new, more efficient antibiotics. Currently, some of the most effective antibiotics (i.e., Vancomycin and Daptomycin) are cyclic peptides produced by non-ribosomal biosynthetic pathways. The isolation and sequencing of cyclic peptide antibiotics, unlike the same activity with linear peptides, is time-consuming and error-prone. The dominant technique for sequencing cyclic peptides is NMR-based and requires large amounts (milligrams) of purified materials that, for most compounds, are not possible to obtain. Given these facts, there is a need for new tools to sequence cyclic NRPs using picograms of material. Since nearly all cyclic NRPs are produced along with related analogs, we develop a mass spectrometry approach for sequencing all related peptides at once (in contrast to the existing approach that analyzes individual peptides). Our results suggest that instead of attempting to isolate and NMR-sequence the most abundant compound, one should acquire spectra of many related compounds and sequence all of them simultaneously using tandem mass spectrometry. We illustrate applications of this approach by sequencing new variants of cyclic peptide antibiotics from Bacillus brevis, as well as sequencing a previously unknown familiy of cyclic NRPs produced by marine bacteria.