In the last few years, much attention has been drawn to emerging contaminants due to their severe effects on human health and the lack of information about them. Among them, erythromycin has risen as a potential threat in developing antimicrobial resistance. Being capable of detecting this component and its variations in water bodies can lead to the creation of measurement methods capable of degrading them.

In our project, erythromycin C-12 hydroxylase (EC 1.14.13.154) is used as a detector for the presence of erythromycin by catalyzing the oxidation of two stereoisomers of erythromycin, erythromycin B and D to erythromycin C. As shown in Figure 1, this reaction requires NADPH as a reagent and, therefore, gives NADP+ as a reaction product. Consequently, it is possible to evaluate the presence of erythromycin through a coupled reaction employing a NADP+/NADPH colorimetric assay.

Figure 1. Chemical reaction for erythromycin C-12 hydroxylase (EryK).

Erythromycin C-12 hydroxylase, as pictured below in Figure 2, is a monomer with 397 amino acids in length and 43.8 kDa in weight. According to Savino et al. (2009), it binds one heme b(iron(II)-protoporphyrin IX) group per subunit as a cofactor. Lambalot et al. (1995) reported a Michaelis constant of 8 μM for erythromycin D, concluding that it shows a 1200-1900-fold preference for erythromycin D over the alternative substrate erythromycin B. This enzyme participates in various molecular and biological processes, ranging from macrolide biosynthetic processes to oxidoreductase reactions.

Figure 2. Three-dimensional structure of EryK.

References

[1]. Lambalot, R. H., Cane, D. E., Aparicio, J. J., & Katz, L. (1995). Overproduction and characterization of the erythromycin C-12 hydroxylase, EryK. Biochemistry, 34(6), 1858–1866. https://doi.org/10.1021/bi00006a006

[2]. Mirdita, M., Schütze, K., Moriwaki, Y. et al.(2022). ColabFold: making protein folding accessible to all. Nat Methods 19, 679–682. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-022-01488-1

[3]. Savino, C., Montemiglio, L. C., Sciara, G., Miele, A. E., Kendrew, S. G., Jemth, P., Gianni, S., & Vallone, B. (2009). Investigating the structural plasticity of a cytochrome P450: three-dimensional structures of P450 EryK and binding to its physiological substrate. The Journal of biological chemistry, 284(42), 29170–29179. https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M109.003590