br Materials and methods br Results

Materials and methods
Results
Discussion Fluoride has multiple effects that contribute to caries prevention. S. mutans is 20- to 40-fold more sensitive to NaF than Lactobacillus casei and seven-fold more sensitive than some species of Actinomyces[10]. There are some specific metabolic effects of fluoride in S. mutans. The major target for fluoride in the bacterial cell is the metalloenzyme enolase, which converts 2-phospho-glycerate to PEP in the glycolytic pathway [11]. It has also been shown that glucose uptake by intact S. mutans cells decreases in the presence of fluoride. Transportation of several sugars is associated with a PEP-dependent phosphotransferase system. Accumulation of a PEP potential by S. mutans results in reduced fluoride sensitivity to glucose uptake [12]. It has also been reported that this enzyme system is not sensitive to fluoride and that inhibition of glucose transport in intact cells is probably due to blockage of PEP production via direct inhibition of enolase activity [13]. A variety of metabolic processes are driven by the potential energy of the transmembrane proton electrochemical gradient. S. mutans transports glucose in response to proton gradients, and it is likely that oral streptococci also transport other sugars and a variety of Voreloxin australia via this mechanism. Gradient generation is energy-dependent and two factors are responsible for mitigation of additional proton extrusion: inhibition of glycolysis at the enolase step in ATP formation, and direct inhibition of H+/ATPase [14]. Proton-translocating ATPases in acidogenic and aciduric bacteria are generally regarded as being essential for maintenance of cellular pH homeostasis during growth and metabolism in acidic environments. Cellular pH homeostasis is influenced by dissipation of the pH gradient, which influences proton-gradient-associated solute transport, and inhibition of ATP formation via the effect of pH on enolase and direct inhibition of proton-pumping H+/ATPases. Fluoride also inhibits the formation of water-insoluble extracellular polysaccharide [15], [16] and metalloenzymes such as phosphatases, pyrophosphatases, and phosphorylases, which require magnesium for their activity. However, many species use fluoride-sensing RNAs to control the expression of proteins that alleviate the deleterious effects of this anion [17]. It is likely that the direct effects of fluoride on enolase and membrane-associated H+/ATPase are important. Therefore, we focused on enolase and designed experiments to examine associations between enolase activity and fluoride resistance for different strains. We investigated the effects of fluoride on the growth of four S. mutans strains using BHI containing NaF (Fig. 1). S. mutans growth was suppressed in a fluoride-concentration-dependent manner. UA130 and NCH105 were more fluoride-resistant than the other strains. NCH105 was originally isolated as a spontaneous mutant of the parent strain UA130 after culture with 1000 μg/mL NaF by Hoelscher and Hudson [7]. They observed that NCH105 growth did not significantly differ in the presence and absence of 370 μg/mL NaF (8.8 mM; initial pH 6.5) and 110 μg/mL NaF (2.6 mM; initial pH 6.0), but there were significant differences in UA130 growth under the same conditions. We used an initial pH of 7.0. UA130 growth was more fluoride-resistant than that of the other strains and was similar to NCH105 growth. The UA130 and NCH105 strains we used were not identical to the strains used by Hoelscher and Hudson. We believe that our UA130 strain developed fluoride resistance before we obtained it. The enolase gene sequence was identified for different strains and compared to the sequence for UA159 (Fig. 3). We observed an amino acid mutation for the UA130 and NCH105 strains. UA130 has a K92R substitution and NHC105 has a P173L substitution. Three-dimensional conformation models were generated using Waals graphics software (Altif Laboratories, Tokyo, Japan) using Streptococcus pnuemoniae enolase (PDB 1W6T) or human enolase (PDB 2ATZ) as a template to evaluate potential effects of these mutations on the protein structure. The point mutations identified are not close to any F− binding sites (Fig. 4a). In fact, structural correlation using F− binding models suggested that there is no conformational effect on F− binding. The structure of S. mutans enolase is a homo-octamer, similar to that of S. pnuemoniae. The octamer model indicates that 92K is close to a subunit–subunit binding area (Fig. 4b). The K92R mutant has a K substitution for R, and Streptococcus sobrinus, Streptococcus sanguis and S. pnuemoniae all have 93R [18], which suggests that the substitution possibly has an effect on binding between subunits and might change the activity of enolase. The point mutations we observed are not directly correlated with conformational changes around the F− binding site because three-dimensional conformation models predict that F− binding occurs close to D318, G165, and S42. However, conformational changes induced by the point mutations might indirectly cause the slightly higher enolase activity of strain NCH105. We believe that enolase activity is one of the factors that confers fluoride resistance, and other factors relevant to fluoride resistance should also be investigated.