Bioresources and Diversity

Lakshmi, M. Vijaya; Lekshmi, S.; Castillo-Godina, Rocío Guadalupe; Campos-Muzquiz, L. G.; Rodríguez‐Herrera, Raúl; Biju, Sajitha; Krishnan, Remya; Swapna, T. S.

doi:10.1007/978-981-19-5841-0_1

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Marine organisms represent a valuable source of new compounds. The biodiversity of the marine environment and the associated chemical diversity constitute a practically unlimited resource of new active substances in the field of development of bioactive products [6,7]. Furthermore, very different kinds of substances have been obtained from marine organisms, mainly because they live in very exigent, competitive, and aggressive surroundings, completely different, in many aspects, from the terrestrial environment, a situation that demands the production of specific and potent active molecules [8,9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Possible Molecular Mechanisms Underlying the Decrease in the Antibacterial Activity of Protamine-like Proteins after Exposure of Mytilus galloprovincialis to Chromium and Mercury

Marinaro

Lettieri

Verrillo

et al. 2023

IJMS

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Natural bioactive compounds represent a new frontier of antimicrobial molecules, and the marine ecosystem represents a new challenge in this regard. In the present work, we evaluated the possibility of changes in the antibacterial activity of protamine-like (PL) proteins, the major nuclear basic protein components of Mytilus galloprovincialis sperm chromatin, after the exposure of mussels to subtoxic doses of chromium (VI) (1, 10, and 100 nM) and mercury (1, 10, and 100 pM) HgCl2, since these metals affect some properties of PL. After exposure, we analyzed the electrophoretic pattern of PLs by both acetic acid-urea polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (AU-PAGE) and SDS-PAGE and determined the MIC and MBC of these proteins on different gram+ and gram– bacteria. PLs, particularly after mussels were exposed to the highest doses of chromium and mercury, showed significantly reduced antibacterial activity. Just at the highest doses of exposure to the two metals, changes were found in the electrophoretic pattern of PLs, suggesting that there were conformational changes in these proteins, which were confirmed by the fluorescence measurements of PLs. These results provide the first evidence of a reduction in the antibacterial activity of these proteins following the exposure of mussels to these metals. Based on the results, hypothetical molecular mechanisms that could explain the decrease in the antibacterial activity of PLs are discussed.

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