Kanamycin

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

Mechanism
Kanamycin interacts with the 30S subunit of prokaryotic ribosomes. It induces substantial amounts of mistranslation and indirectly inhibits translocation during protein synthesis.

Side effects
Serious side effects include tinnitus or loss of hearing, 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 (50-100 ug/ml) containing agar plates or are grown in media containing kanamycin (50-100 ug/ml). 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 (50 mg/ml).

Mammalian cells and other eukaryotes are screened using G418, a similar aminoglycoside antibiotic, which KanMX confers resistance against.

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.