Characterization of guanylate kinase from gram positive and gram negative microorganisms; preliminary results

Guanylate kinase is a member of the nucleoside monophosphate (NMP) kinase family, a family of enzymes that despite having a low primary structure identity share a similar fold, which consists of three structurally distinct regions termed the CORE, LID, and NMP-binding regions. Guanylate kinase (GMPK) is an essential enzyme for the biosynthesis of GTP and dGTP by catalyzing the phosphoryl transfer from ATP to (d)GMP resulting in ADP and (d)GDP. Despite the similar fold of the monomer there is an important difference between GMPKs from prokaryotes and eukaryotes: eukaryotes GMPK are monomers while prokaryotes GMPK are dimmers, tetramers or hexamers. For this reason bacterial GMPKs are possible targets for new antibacterial drugs. Finding new targets for antibacterial therapies is a prior subject in today's medical research. The purpose of this work was to characterize guanylate kinases from both gram positive and gram negative pathogenic bacteria. We started with GMPK from Enterococcus faecalis as gram positive microorganism and Pseudomonas aeruginosa as gram negative representative.