Multidrug resistant phenotype of Bacillus subtilis spontaneous mutants isolated in the presence of puromycin and lincomycin

Abstract

Spontaneous mutants were isolated by growing Bacillus subtilis 168 in the presence of high concentrations of puromycin and lincomycin. These mutants showed increased resistance to several drugs other than these two drugs. The lmrAB genes, which encode a transcriptional repressor and a drug efflux protein of the major facilitator superfamily, were involved in this phenotype. Northern hybridization analysis showed that the expression of lmrAB gene increased more than 30-fold. The following two types of mutations were found to be responsible for the multidrug resistant phenotype: (i) a nucleotide replacement in the region between the promoter and initiation codon of lmrA and (ii) nucleotide replacements that resulted in amino acid replacements in the LmrA protein. The results indicate that LmrB is a multidrug resistant protein and that LmrA is a repressor, which autogenously represses the transcription of the lmrAB operon.Key words: multidrug resistance (MDR), major facilitator superfamily (MFS), lincomycin resistance, lmrAB genes.