Research

More than anything else in the world, people die of infectious diseases, and this is especially true for children. In big part, the reason for these high mortality rates is that microbes have become over years increasingly drug resistant.

Gram-negative bacteria are surrounded by two membranes: an inner membrane and an outer membrane that are separated by about 20 nanometers of the periplasmic space. Only the inner membrane generates energy (in the form of ATP or electrochemical gradients). However, the outer membrane also requires energy for several work-demanding processes.

Like ABC transporters, P-type ATPases (or P-type pumps) are membrane-embedded proteins that use ATP to transport molecules across membranes. They are very different in structure and mechanism from ABC transporters.

ABC proteins are a large group of proteins with ~80 genes in human in E. coli. They participate in most cellular functions, functioning mostly (but not exclusively) as transporters. No matter what their physiological function is, ABC transporters share common elements of primary, secondary, and tertiary structure. For some time, these similarities between ABC transporters…