Hiroki Kaneko

Controlling Substrate Preference and Transglycosylation Activity of Neopullulanase by Manipulating Steric Constraint and Hydrophobicity in Active Center

The substrate specificity and the transglycosylation activity of neopullulanase was altered by site-directed mutagenesis on the basis of information from a three-dimensional structure predicted by computer-aided molecular modeling. According to the predicted three-dimensional structure of the enzyme-substrate complex, it was most likely that Ile-358 affected the substrate preference of the enzyme. Replacing Ile-358 with Trp, which has a bulky side chain, reduced the acceptability of α-(1→6)-branched oligo- and polysaccharides as substrates. The characteristics of the I358W-mutated enzyme were quite different from those of wild-type neopullulanase and rather similar to those of typical starch-saccharifying α-amylase. In contrast, replacing Ile-358 with Val, which has a smaller side chain, increased the preference for α-(1→6)-branched oligosaccharides and pullulan as substrates. The transglycosylation activity of neopullulanase appeared to be controlled by manipulating the hydrophobicity around the attacking water molecule, which is most likely used to cleave the glucosidic linkage in the hydrolysis reaction. We predicted three residues, Tyr-377, Met-375, and Ser-422, which were located on the entrance path of the water molecule might be involved. The transglycosylation activity of neopullulanase was increased by replacing one of the three residues with more hydrophobic amino acid residues; Y377F, M375L, and S422V. In contrast, the transglycosylation activity of the enzyme was decreased by replacing Tyr-377 with hydrophilic amino acid residues, Asp or Ser.

Performance of fast multipole methods for calculating electrostatic interactions in biomacromolecular simulations

The fast multipole method proposed by Greengard and Rokhlin (GR) is applied to large biomacromolecular systems. In this method, the system is divided into a hierarchy of cells, and electric field exerted on a particle is decomposed into two parts. The first part is a rapidly varying field due to nearby cells, so that it needs rigorous pairwise calculations. The second part is a slowly varying local field due to distant cells; hence, it allows rapid calculations through a multipole expansion technique. In this work, two additional possibilities for improving the performance are numerically examined. The first is an improvement of the convergence of the expansion by increasing the number of nearby cells, without including higher‐order multipole moments. The second is an acceleration of the calculations by the particle–particle and particle–mesh/multipole expansion (PPPM/MPE) method, which uses fast Fourier transform instead of the hierarchy. For this purpose, the PPPM/MPE method originally developed by the authors for a periodic system is extended to a nonperiodic isolated system. The advantages and disadvantages of the GR and PPPM/MPE methods are discussed for both periodic and isolated systems. It is numerically shown that these methods with reasonable costs can reduce the error in potential felt by each particle to 0.1–1 kcal/mol, much smaller than the 30‐kcal/mol error involved in conventional simple truncations.

Efficient calculations of Coulombic interactions in biomolecular simulations with periodic boundary conditions

To make improved treatments of electrostatic interactions in biomacromolecular simulations, two possibilities are considered. The first is the famous particle–particle and particle–mesh (PPPM) method developed by Hockney and Eastwood, and the second is a new one developed here in their spirit but by the use of the multipole expansion technique suggested by Ladd. It is then numerically found that the new PPPM method gives more accurate results for a two‐particle system at small separation of particles. Preliminary numerical examination of the various computational methods for a single configuration of a model BPTI–water system containing about 24,000 particles indicates that both of the PPPM methods give far more accurate values with reasonable computational cost than do the conventional truncation methods. It is concluded the two PPPM methods are nearly comparable in overall performance for the many‐particle systems, although the first method has the drawback that the accuracy in the total electrostatic energy is not high for configurations of charged particles randomly generated.

Ab initio MO studies of interaction mechanisms of Protein Kinase C with cell membranes

Protein Kinase C (PKC) is a family of regulatory enzymes. It is considered that binding with phorbol ester which are PKC activators, increases affinity of PKC for the membranes and consequently induces its conformation change. Electrostatic interactions between PKC and the membrane is assumed to be important, and performed ab initio MO calculations of one domain of PKC consisting of 50 amino acids and its complex with the ester is performed to investigate how the electrostatic potential of PKC changes through docking with the substrate. From the calculation, it is shown that the electrostatic potential of PKC near the binding site is dramatically affected through the binding, suggesting attractive interactions with the cell membrane.