Screening of New Antibiotics Inhibiting Bacterial Peptide deformylase (PDF)

Peptide deformylase (PDF) is essential and unique to bacteria for cytoplasmic protein synthesis, but not required in eukaryotes, thus making it an attractive target for the discovery of novel antibacterial drugs. Protein synthesis in eubacteria, under normal conditions, is initiated by formyl-methionyl-tRNA. PDF removes the formyl-group of N- formylmethionine of newly synthesized polypeptides to produce a mature protein. In this study, a pdf gene from Staphylococcus aureus 6538p was cloned in pET-14b vector and transformed in Escherichia coli BL21 (DE3). (omitted)