bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.16.206821; this version posted July 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Altering the solubility of the antibiotic candidate Nisin – a computational study Preeti Pandey#*, Ulrich H.E. Hansmann#* and Feng Wang+* #Dept. of Chemistry & Biochemistry, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Ok 73019, USA +Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA *Correspondence should be addressed to
[email protected],
[email protected] or
[email protected] Abstract: The growing bacterial resistance to available antibiotics makes it necessary to look for new drug candidates. An example is a lanthionine-containing nisin, which has a broad spectrum of antimi- crobial activity. While nisin is widely utilized as a food preservative, its poor solubility and low stability at physiological pH hinder its use as an antibiotic. As the solubility of nisin is controlled by the residues of the hinge region, we have performed molecular dynamics simulations of vari- ous mutants and studied their effects on nisin’s solubility. These simulations are complicated by the presence of two uncommon residues (dehydroalanine and dehydrobutyrine) in the peptide. The primary goal of the present study is to derive rules for designing new mutants that will be 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.16.206821; this version posted July 17, 2020.