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. 2017 Nov 28;7:16521. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-16497-w

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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MexA-dependent opening of the OprM periplasmic aperture. (A) Structure of OprM highlighting the constraints in the periplasmic tips. Three helices are packed together and enclose three hydrophobic leucine residues (Leu429; one per OprM protomer) with an α-carbon distance value of 0.5 nm between each pair of leucines. These three leucine residues are used as reference points for computing a triangular-shaped area (dotted red lines) for monitoring the aperture area. (B) Top panel: Spontaneous partial opening that leads to water translocation through the closed state of OprM. Two independent simulations (black and grey dotted lines) reveal stochastic partial opening with an increase of ~5 Å² that allows the permeation of 10 water molecules. This process occurs within 1 µs of the simulation (black and grey dotted lines). Bottom panel: OprM aperture opening is activated by the close interactions between the outer membrane and periplasmic proteins (purple). The aperture opening was computed as a function of the enclosed triangular shaped area as given in (A). As a reference, the average area of closed OprM (black) is also provided. Aperture opening of OprM is not fully triggered by the interaction with the inner component MexB (green) and remains only in a partially opened state.