Blueprints for the rational design of therapeutic mutacin 1140 variants.

Lantibiotics represent a large untapped pipeline of attractive scaffolds for the development of novel antibiotics. Saturation mutagenesis was employed to substitute every amino acid of a lantibiotic called mutacin 1140 (MU1140), creating an unbiased expression library of 418 variants that was used to study the permissiveness to mutagenesis and the "drugability" of several compounds. Contrasting previous reports, the results from this study supported that not all residues involved in lanthionine bridge formation were critical for maintaining optimal activity. While substitutions in lanthionine bridges in Ring A, C, and D invariably lead to inactive variants, permissive substitutions in Abu8 and Ala11 (Ring B) were observed, albeit infrequently. Further, the data generated suggested that the unsaturated bond from Dha5 (Ser5) may not be critically involved in Lipid-II binding but still important for conferring optimal activity. This study identified additional permissive mutations of Ser5, including Ser5His, Ser5Met, Ser5Gln, and Ser5Leu. In contrast, no permissive substitutions were identified for Dhb14, which suggested that this residue may be critical for optimal activity. Novel blueprints are proposed for directing further development of MU1140 variants and other lantibiotics, which may enable the rational design, development, manufacture, and formulation of an entirely new class of anti-infectives.