Kanamycin

Kanamycin sulfate is an aminoglycoside antibiotic, available in both oral and intravenous forms, and used to treat a wide variety of infections. Kanamycin is isolated from Streptomyces kanamyceticus.

Pharmacology

Kanamycin works by affecting the 30S ribosomal subunit and causing a frameshift mutation or it prevents the translation of RNA. This means that instead of a codon CAT (for example in sequence CATG), a codon ATG is read by aminoacyl tRNA (aa-tRNA). Aminoacyl tRNA is consequently carrying a different amino acid, because the anticodon on the aa-tRNA is different. The protein needed cannot be synthesized: depending on the site and severity of the frame shift, either a completely different protein is synthesized, or a protein similar to the one needed is synthesized, but is folded incorrectly. A bacterium is destroyed because it cannot produce any of its proteins correctly.

Kanamycin is not given to humans often because of its fairly toxic side-effects.

Side effects

Serious side effects include changes in hearing (either hearing loss or ringing in the ears), toxicity to kidneys, and allergic reactions to the drug.

Use in research

Kanamycin is used in molecular biology as a selective agent most commonly to isolate bacteria (e.g., E. coli) which have taken up genes (e.g., of plasmids) coupled to a gene coding for kanamycin resistance (primarily Neomycin phosphotransferase II [NPT II/Neo]). Bacteria that have been transformed with a plasmid containing the kanamycin resistance gene are plated on kanamycin (50-100mg/L) containing agar plates or are grown in media containing kanamycin (50-100mg/L). Only the bacteria that have successfully taken up the kanamycin resistance gene become resistant and will grow under these conditions. As a powder kanamycin is white to off-white and is soluble in water (50mg/ml).

At least one such gene, Atwbc19 is native to a plant species, of comparatively large size and its coded protein acts in a manner which decreases the possibility of Horizontal Gene Transfer from the plant to bacteria; it may be incapable of giving resistance to kanamycin to bacteria even if gene transfer occurs.

Translation

The word "Kanamycin" occurs as such in the following languages: English, German.

Translation(s) in other languages: Afrikaans: Kannamisien, Arabic: كاناميسين, Spanish: Kanamicina, French: Kanamycine, Italian: Kanamicina, Japanese: カナマイシン, Polish: Kanamycyna, Portuguese: Canamicina, Slovenian: Kanamicin, Thai: กานามัยซิน, Chinese: 卡那徽素.