Jack F. Kirsch

Autoinhibition of Human Dicer by Its Internal Helicase Domain

Dicer, a member of the ribonuclease III family of enzymes, processes double-stranded RNA substrates into approximately 21- to 27-nt products that trigger sequence-directed gene silencing by RNA interference. Although the mechanism of RNA recognition and length-specific cleavage by Dicer has been established, the way in which dicing activity is regulated is unclear. Here, we show that the N-terminal domain of human Dicer, which is homologous to DExD/H-box helicases, substantially attenuates the rate of substrate cleavage. Deletion or mutation of this domain activates human Dicer in both single- and multiple-turnover assays. The catalytic efficiency (k(cat)/K(m)) of the deletion construct is increased by 65-fold over that exhibited by the intact enzyme. Kinetic analysis shows that this activation is almost entirely due to an enhancement in k(cat). Modest stimulation of catalysis by the full-length Dicer enzyme was observed in the presence of the TAR-RNA binding protein, which physically interacts with the DExD/H-box domain. These results suggest that the DExD/H-box domain likely disrupts the functionality of the Dicer active site until a structural rearrangement occurs, perhaps upon assembly with its molecular partners.

How Does an Enzyme Evolved In vitro Compare to Naturally Occurring Homologs Possessing the Targeted Function? Tyrosine Aminotransferase from Aspartate Aminotransferase

Aspartate aminotransferase (AATase) and tyrosine aminotransferase (TATase) are Escherichia coli paralogs that share 43% sequence identity. A plausible model posits that TATase arose from a duplication of an ancestral AATase-like enzyme. Directed evolution of AATase to an enzyme having TATase activity was undertaken in order to compare the evolved AATase variants with homologous TATases. Eight rounds of DNA shuffling and in vivo selection followed by a backcross with WT AATase produced enzymes that exhibited 100-270-fold increases in k(cat)/K(m)(Phe) and had as much as 11% of the tyrosine aminotransferase activity of WT E.coli TATase. Amino acid substitutions in 11 clones from rounds 7 and 8 were compared with conserved residues in AATases and TATases. The findings are conveniently and compactly illustrated by the use of Venn diagrams and set theory notation. A statistically significant (0.001<or=p<or=0.008) concentration of mutations occurs in a subset of positions (set AAT-TAT) that is conserved (>or=75% identical) in AATases and variable (<75% identical) in TATases. Very few mutations occur in the intersection (set AAT intersection TAT) of amino acid residues that are conserved in both enzyme types. Seven mutations from set AAT-TAT were combined by site-directed mutagenesis to give a construct that is 60% as active as the best round 8 enzyme, which has 13 amino acid replacements. The Venn diagrams may provide a generally useful tool to highlight the most important specificity determinants for rational redesign. Amino acid replacements were mapped onto the crystal structure of a hydrocinnamate complex of a designed TATase. Five of the seven positions most frequently substituted in the evolved clones are within 15 A of the phenyl side-chain, but only six of the 48 positions that were mutated once or twice are within that radius. Context dependence, neutral mutations, different selective pressures, and stochastic components provide explanations for the observation that many of the substitutions found in the directly evolved enzymes differ from the corresponding amino acids found in the modern natural TATases.

Active site prediction using evolutionary and structural information

Motivation: The identification of catalytic residues is a key step in understanding the function of enzymes. While a variety of computational methods have been developed for this task, accuracies have remained fairly low. The best existing method exploits information from sequence and structure to achieve a precision (the fraction of predicted catalytic residues that are catalytic) of 18.5% at a corresponding recall (the fraction of catalytic residues identified) of 57% on a standard benchmark. Here we present a new method, Discern, which provides a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art through the use of statistical techniques to derive a model with a small set of features that are jointly predictive of enzyme active sites. Results: In cross-validation experiments on two benchmark datasets from the Catalytic Site Atlas and CATRES resources containing a total of 437 manually curated enzymes spanning 487 SCOP families, Discern increases catalytic site recall between 12% and 20% over methods that combine information from both sequence and structure, and by ≥50% over methods that make use of sequence conservation signal only. Controlled experiments show that Discerns improvement in catalytic residue prediction is derived from the combination of three ingredients: the use of the INTREPID phylogenomic method to extract conservation information; the use of 3D structure data, including features computed for residues that are proximal in the structure; and a statistical regularization procedure to prevent overfitting. Contact: kimmen@berkeley.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Site-directed mutagenesis of aspartate aminotransferase from E. coli

The gene for aspartate aminotransferase from E. coli (aspC) was subcloned into M13 phage and sequenced using the Sanger dideoxy method with synthetic oligonucleotide primers. A mutant gene was constructed using site-directed mutagenesis techniques in which the codon for the lysine that forms the Schiffs base with pyridoxal phosphate was replaced with one coding for alanine. The mutant gene was expressed under control of the Tac promoter to overproduce a mutant protein lacking enzymatic activity.

Structural and Computational Characterization of the SHV-1 β-Lactamase-β-Lactamase Inhibitor Protein Interface

β-Lactamase inhibitor protein (BLIP) binds a variety of class A β-lactamases with affinities ranging from micromolar to picomolar. Whereas the TEM-1 and SHV-1 β-lactamases are almost structurally identical, BLIP binds TEM-1 ∼1000-fold tighter than SHV-1. Determining the underlying source of this affinity difference is important for understanding the molecular basis of β-lactamase inhibition and mechanisms of protein-protein interface specificity and affinity. Here we present the 1.6Å resolution crystal structure of SHV-1 ·BLIP. In addition, a point mutation was identified, SHV D104E, that increases SHV ·BLIP binding affinity from micromolar to nanomolar. Comparison of the SHV-1 ·BLIP structure with the published TEM-1 ·BLIP structure suggests that the increased volume of Glu-104 stabilizes a key binding loop in the interface. Solution of the 1.8Å SHV D104K ·BLIP crystal structure identifies a novel conformation in which this binding loop is removed from the interface. Using these structural data, we evaluated the ability of EGAD, a program developed for computational protein design, to calculate changes in the stability of mutant β-lactamase ·BLIP complexes. Changes in binding affinity were calculated within an error of 1.6 kcal/mol of the experimental values for 112 mutations at the TEM-1 ·BLIP interface and within an error of 2.2 kcal/mol for 24 mutations at the SHV-1 ·BLIP interface. The reasonable success of EGAD in predicting changes in interface stability is a promising step toward understanding the stability of the β-lactamase ·BLIP complexes and computationally assisted design of tight binding BLIP variants.

Free energies of protein–protein association determined by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry correlate accurately with values obtained by solution methods

The advantages of electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESIMS) to measure relative solution‐phase affinities of tightly bound protein–protein complexes are demonstrated with selected variants of the Bacillus amyloliquefaciens protein barstar (b*) and the RNAase barnase (bn), which form protein–protein complexes with a range of picomolar to nanomolar dissociation constants. A novel chemical annealing procedure rapidly establishes equilibrium in solutions containing competing b* variants with limiting bn. The relative ion abundances of the complexes and those of the competing unbound monomers are shown to reflect the relative solution‐phase concentrations of those respective species. No measurable dissociation of the complexes occurs either during ESI or mass detection, nor is there any evidence for nonspecific binding at protein concentrations <25 μM. Differences in ΔΔG of dissociation between variants were determined with precisions <0.1 kcal/mol. The ΔΔG values obtained deviate on average by 0.26 kcal/mol from those measured with a solution‐phase enzyme assay. It is demonstrated that information about the protein conformation and covalent modifications can be obtained from differences in mass and charge state distributions. This method serves as a rapid and precise means to interrogate protein–protein‐binding surfaces for complexes that have affinities in the picomolar to nanomolar range.

Oxygen-18 leaving group kinetic isotope effects on the hydrolysis of nitrophenyl glycosides. 2. Lysozyme and .beta.-glucosidase: acid and alkaline hydrolysis

Oxygen-18 leaving group kinetic isotope effects (KIEs) have been measured for a set of glycosyl transfer reactions with p-nitrophenyl beta-D-glycosides as substrates. Acid-catalyzed hydrolysis and alkaline hydrolysis exhibit KIEs of K16/k18 = 1.0355 +/- 0.0015 and 1.0386 +/- 0.0032, respectively. Lysozyme and beta-glucosidase A show KIEs on Vmax/Km (V/K) of (V/KI)16/(V/K)18 = 1.0467 +/- 0.0015 and 1.0377 +/0 0.0061, respectively. The large magnitude of these KIEs requires that carbon-oxygen bond scission be far advanced in the transition states for these reactions; therefore in the transition states for the first irreversible steps in these reaction sequences, scission of the glycosidic bond must be essentially complete for the reactions catalyzed by lysozyme and beta-glucosidase A, which are thought to proceed via SN1 and SN2 mechanisms, respectively. Acid-catalyzed hydrolysis is shown to proceed through a transition state involving at least 80% C-O bond cleavage and only partially proton transfer to the leaving p-nitrophenyl oxygen atom.

Computational Redesign of the SHV-1 β-lactamase/β-lactamase Inhibitor Protein Interface

Beta-lactamases are enzymes that catalyze the hydrolysis of beta-lactam antibiotics. beta-lactamase/beta-lactamase inhibitor protein (BLIP) complexes are emerging as a well characterized experimental model system for studying protein-protein interactions. BLIP is a 165 amino acid protein that inhibits several class A beta-lactamases with a wide range of affinities: picomolar affinity for K1; nanomolar affinity for TEM-1, SME-1, and BlaI; but only micromolar affinity for SHV-1 beta-lactamase. The large differences in affinity coupled with the availability of extensive mutagenesis data and high-resolution crystal structures for the TEM-1/BLIP and SHV-1/BLIP complexes make them attractive systems for the further development of computational design methodology. We used EGAD, a physics-based computational design program, to redesign BLIP in an attempt to increase affinity for SHV-1. Characterization of several of designs and point mutants revealed that in all cases, the mutations stabilize the interface by 10- to 1000-fold relative to wild type BLIP. The calculated changes in binding affinity for the mutants were within a mean absolute error of 0.87 kcal/mol from the experimental values, and comparison of the calculated and experimental values for a set of 30 SHV-1/BLIP complexes yielded a correlation coefficient of 0.77. Structures of the two complexes with the highest affinity, SHV-1/BLIP (E73M) and SHV-1/BLIP (E73M, S130K, S146M), are presented at 1.7 A resolution. While the predicted structures have much in common with the experimentally determined structures, they do not coincide perfectly; in particular a salt bridge between SHV-1 D104 and BLIP K74 is observed in the experimental structures, but not in the predicted design conformations. This discrepancy highlights the difficulty of modeling salt bridge interactions with a protein design algorithm that approximates side chains as discrete rotamers. Nevertheless, while local structural features of the interface were sometimes miscalculated, EGAD is globally successful in designing complexes with increased affinity.

Directed evolution relieves product inhibition and confers in vivo function to a rationally designed tyrosine aminotransferase

The Escherichia coli aspartate (AATase) and tyrosine (TATase) aminotransferases share 43% sequence identity and 72% similarity, but AATase has only 0.08% and 0.01% of the TATase activities (kcat/Km) for tyrosine and phenylalanine, respectively. Approximately 5% of TATase activity was introduced into the AATase framework earlier both by rational design (six mutations, termed HEX) and by directed evolution (9–17 mutations). The enzymes realized from the latter procedure complement tyrosine auxotrophy in TATase deficient E. coli. HEX complements even more poorly than does wild‐type AATase, even though the (kcat/Km) value for tyrosine exhibited by HEX is similar to those of the enzymes found from directed evolution. HEX, however, is characterized by very low values of Km and KD for dicarboxylic ligands, and by a particularly slow release for oxaloacetate, the product of the reaction with aspartate and a TCA cycle intermediate. These observations suggest that HEX exists largely as an enzyme–product complex in vivo. HEX was therefore subjected to a single round of directed evolution with selection for complementation of tyrosine auxotrophy. A variant with a single amino acid substitution, A293D, exhibited substantially improved TATase function in vivo. The A293D mutation alleviates the tight binding to dicarboxylic ligands as Kms for aspartate and α‐ketoglutarate are >20‐fold higher in the HEX + A293D construct compared to HEX. This mutation also increased kcat/KmTyr threefold. A second mutation, I73V, elicited smaller but similar effects. Both residues are in close proximity to Arg292 and the mutations may function to modulate the arginine switch mechanism responsible for dual substrate recognition in TATases and HEX.

Apple 1-Aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate Synthase in Complex with the Inhibitor l-Aminoethoxyvinylglycine EVIDENCE FOR A KETIMINE INTERMEDIATE

The 1.6-Å crystal structure of the covalent ketimine complex of apple 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate (ACC) synthase with the potent inhibitorl-aminoethoxyvinylglycine (AVG) is described. ACC synthase catalyzes the committed step in the biosynthesis of ethylene, a plant hormone that is responsible for the initiation of fruit ripening and for regulating many other developmental processes. AVG is widely used in plant physiology studies to inhibit the activity of ACC synthase. The structural assignment is supported by the fact that the complex absorbs maximally at 341 nm. These results are not in accord with the recently reported crystal structure of the tomato ACC synthase AVG complex, which claims that the inhibitor only associates noncovalently. The rate constant for the association of AVG with apple ACC synthase was determined by stopped-flow spectrophotometry (2.1 × 105 m −1 s−1) and by the rate of loss of enzyme activity (1.1 × 105 m −1 s−1). The dissociation rate constant determined by activity recovery is 2.4 × 10−6 s−1. Thus, the calculatedK d value is 10–20 pm.