Sequence analysis of putative swrW gene required for surfactant serrawettin W1 production from Serratia marcescens

Abstract

Serratia marcescens produces biosurfactant serrawettin, essential for its population migration behavior. Serrawettin W1 was revealed to be an antibiotic serratamolide that makes it significant for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and protein sequence analysis. Four nucleotide and amino-acid sequences from local strains analyzed through bioinformatics showed high confidence prediction of serrawettin. Database comparison analysis resulted to high similarity of the nucleotide sequence to the swrW gene of 88 to 94%, the homologous protein sequence to the serrawettin W1 synthetase protein ranging from 85 to 89%, presence of condensation domain from the non-ribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) family that synthesize peptide antibiotics and strong relation to the predicted surfactin synthetase structure. Further protein analysis showed high identical multiple alignment having conserved regions and the predicted structure representation was identified as putative surfactin a synthetase c (srfa-c), a non-ribosomal peptide synthetase termination module with 100% confidence. These nucleotide and protein sequence analysis of the putative swrW gene provides vital information on the versatility of S. marcescens as a pathogen of diverse hosts and an impetus for further genetic manipulation for practical applications.

Keywords: swrW gene, serrawettin W1, non-ribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS)