Evolution of broad spectrum β-lactam resistance in an engineered metallo-β-lactamase.

The extensive use and misuse of antibiotics during the last seven decades has led to the evolution and global spread of a variety of resistance mechanisms in bacteria. Of high medical importance are β-lactamases, a group of enzymes inactivating β-lactam antibiotics. Metallo-β-lactamases (MBLs) are particularly problematic because of their ability to act on virtually all classes of β-lactam antibiotics. An engineered MBL (evMBL9) characterized by low level activity with several β-lactam antibiotics was constructed and employed as a parental MBL in an experiment to examine how an enzyme can evolve toward increased activity with a variety of β-lactam antibiotics. We designed and synthesized a mutant library in which the substrate activity profile was varied by randomizing six active site amino acid residues. The library was expressed in Salmonella typhimurium, clones with increased resistance against seven different β-lactam antibiotics (penicillin G, ampicillin, cephalothin, cefaclor, cefuroxime, cefoperazone, and cefotaxime) were isolated, and the MBL variants were characterized. For the majority of the mutants, bacterial resistance was significantly increased despite marked reductions in both mRNA and protein levels relative to those of parental evMBL9, indicating that the catalytic activities of these mutant MBLs were highly increased. Multivariate analysis showed that the majority of the mutant enzymes were generalists, conferring increased resistance against most of the examined β-lactams.