The presence of a high bacterial population in a region of the gastrointestinal tract is usually associated with the secretion of sulphomucins into the mucus gel covering that region. The term 'sulphomucin' is a histochemical description of the staining properties of mucin. At present this term can only be qualitatively related to the percentage of sulphate in the mucin molecule, which makes the term difficult to use in a biochemical and functional sense. Sulphomucins are thought to carry out the normal functions attributed to mucins; in addition, heavy sulphation rate-limits the degradation of mucins by bacterial mucin-degrading glycosidases. A number of mucin-specific glycosulphatases have been reported in bacteria, although only two such enzymes have been purified. These enzymes remove part of the sulphate content from sulphomucins and make them more susceptible to further enzymic degradation. The variety of chain locations and sugar attachment sites of sulphate esters on the mucin oligosaccharides, taken together with the data on the enzymes, suggest there will be a spectrum of bacterial glycosulphatases, with different properties, cellular locations and substrate specificities. Bacterial glycosulphatases have the potential to modify sulphated glycoconjugates at mucosal surfaces and should prove useful as biochemical tools for the study of sulphated glycoconjugates.
Mucin desulfation is believed to be a rate-limiting step in mucin degradation by colon bacteria. The activities of enzymes hydrolysing nine linkages found in mucin oligosaccharide chains were measured using model substrates, in extracts of two mucin-degrading bacteria, Prevotella strain RS2 and Bacteroides fragilis. Sulfatases desulfating N-acetylglucosamine-6-sulfate, galactose-6-sulfate and galactose-3-sulfate were found. The genomic DNA downstream from the gene encoding the mucin-desulfating sulfatase (N-acetylglucosamine-6-sulfatase) in Prevotella was sequenced, and two putative genes identified which are likely to be coexpressed with this sulfatase, though their activities are unknown. Northern and Western analyses showed that expression of this short operon of three genes is increased during growth on mucin.
A gene encoding the mucin-desulfating sulfatase in Prevotella strain RS2 has been cloned, sequenced, and expressed in an active form. A 600-bp PCR product generated using primers designed from amino acid sequence data was used to isolate a 5,058-bp genomic DNA fragment containing the mucin-desulfating sulfatase gene. A 1,551-bp open reading frame encoding the sulfatase proprotein was identified, and the deduced 517-amino-acid protein minus its signal sequence corresponded well with the published mass of 58 kDa estimated by denaturing gel electrophoresis. The sulfatase sequence showed homology to aryl-and nonarylsulfatases with different substrate specificities from the sulfatases of other organisms. No sulfatase activity could be detected when the sulfatase gene was cloned into Escherichia coli expression vectors. However, cloning the gene into a Bacteroides expression vector did produce active sulfatase. This is the first mucin-desulfating sulfatase to be sequenced and expressed. A second open reading frame (1,257 bp) was identified immediately upstream from the sulfatase gene, coding in the opposite direction. Its sequence has close homology to iron-sulfur proteins that posttranslationally modify other sulfatases. By analogy, this protein is predicted to catalyze the modification of a serine group to a formylglycine group at the active center of the mucin-desulfating sulfatase, which is necessary for enzymatic activity.Mucins are high-molecular-weight glycoproteins which form the structural component of the protective mucus gel layer at the surfaces of the gastrointestinal, respiratory, and female genital tracts. Colonic mucin, particularly in the proximal region, contains significant levels of sulfate covalently bound to the mucin oligosaccharide chains, and levels of 2.0 to 6.5 g of sulfate per 100 g of mucin have been found (9, 17). Heavily sulfated mucins (sulfomucins) have many of the general lubricating and barrier functions of mucins with lower sulfate levels. There is accumulating evidence that sulfomucins may, in addition, rate-limit mucin degradation by mucin-degrading bacterial enzymes (4,7,13,15,18,24,26,27), and this role is thought to be particularly important in the colon, where approximately 10 14 bacterial cells are located (10). There have been reports of mucin-desulfating sulfatases that partially remove the sulfate from sulfomucin in a number of bacteria from the mouth, stomach, and colon and in feces. The effect of such sulfatases is to increase the susceptibility of the mucin to degradation by other mucin-degrading enzymes (4, 27). Elevated levels of bacterial mucin-desulfating sulfatases are found in feces of patients with ulcerative colitis (26). The sulfated sugar specificity of these fecal sulfatases, the number of different types present, the bacterial origin of the elevated levels, and the conditions which regulate bacterial production of such enzymes are unknown. The types of mucin-desulfating sulfatases that might be predicted include sulfatases specific for galactose-3-sulfate, g...
A novel enzyme which may be important in mucin degradation has been discovered in the mucin-utilizing anaerobe Prevotella strain RS2. This enzyme cleaves terminal 2-acetamido-2-deoxy--D-glucopyranoside 6-sulfate (6-SO 3 -GlcNAc) residues from sulfomucin and from the model substrate 4-nitrophenyl 2-acetamido-2-deoxy--D-glucopyranoside 6-sodium sulfate. The existence of this mucin-desulfating glycosidase (sulfoglycosidase) suggests an alternative mechanism by which this bacterium may desulfate sulfomucins, by glycosidic removal of a sulfated sugar from mucin oligosaccharide chains. Previously, mucin desulfation was thought to take place by the action of a specific desulfating enzyme, which then allowed glycosidases to remove desulfated sugar. Sulfate removal from sulfomucins is thought to be a rate-limiting step in mucin degradation by bacteria in the regions of the digestive tract with a significant bacterial flora. The sulfoglycosidase was induced by growth of the Prevotella strain on mucin and was purified 284-fold from periplasmic extracts. Tryptic digestion and sequencing of peptides from the 100-kDa protein enabled the sulfoglycosidase gene to be cloned and sequenced. Active recombinant enzyme was made in an Escherichia coli expression system. The sulfoglycosidase shows sequence similarity to hexosaminidases. The only other enzyme that has been shown to remove 6-SO 3 -GlcNAc from glycoside substrates is the human lysosomal enzyme -N-acetylhexosaminidase A, point mutations in which cause the inheritable, lysosomal storage disorder Tay-Sachs disease. The human enzyme removes GlcNAc from glycoside substrates also, in contrast to the Prevotella enzyme, which acts on a nonsulfated substrate at a rate that is only 1% of the rate observed with a sulfated substrate.
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