Diversity among the gram-positive acetyltransferases inactivating streptogramin A and structurally related compounds and characterization of a new staphylococcal determinant, vatB.

A gene encoding an acetyltransferase inactivating streptogramin A (SgA) and structurally similar compounds was isolated from a staphylococcal plasmid and sequenced. This gene, designated vatB, potentially encodes a 212-amino-acid protein, VatB, of 23,320 Da with 47.4 and 58.4% amino acid identities with two other enzymes with the same activity, Vat and SatA, respectively, which are encoded by a staphylococcal plasmid and an enterococcal plasmid, respectively. The C-terminal parts of these three enzymes share significant homology with the C-terminal parts of 10 other acetyltransferases modifying various substrates. A pair of degenerate primers representing the conserved motifs shared by VatB, Vat, and SatA was designed to detect the three genes encoding these SgA acetyltransferases. Five of 12 clinical SgAr Staphylococcus aureus isolates tested carried neither these genes nor the gene vga, which confers resistance to SgA by a different mechanism, suggesting that another gene(s) and possibly another mechanism of resistance to SgA in staphylococci remains to be characterized.