| Polyenemacrolides such as amphotericin
B (AmB) were thought to assemble together and form an ion channel across
plasma membranes. Their antimicrobial activity has been accounted for
by this assemblage, whose stability and activity are dependent on sterol
constituents of lipid bilayer membranes. The structure of this channel-like
assemblage formed in biomembranes has been a target of extensive investigations
for long time. For the first step to this goal, we prepared several AmB
dimers with various linkers and tested for their channel-forming activity.
Among these, AmB dimers that bore an aminoalkyl-dicarboxylate tether
covalently linked between amino groups of AmB showed potent hemolytic
activity. Furthermore, K+ influx actions monitored by pH of liposome
lumen by 31P NMR revealed that the dimers formed the molecular assemblage
similar to that of AmB in phospholipid membrane. Judging from changes
in 31P NMR spectra, the dimers appeared to induce "all-or-none" -type
ion flux across liposome membrane in the presence of ergosterol, which
suggested that ion-channel formed by ergosterol/dimer is similar to that
of AmB. With these data in hand, we are now trying to elucidate the structure
of the ion-channel complex by making the labeled conjugates of AmB for
NMR measurements. |