Organic Letters
Letter
of a benzene ring has been difficult in both laboratories and
biological systems due to its high resonance energy. Although
members of the OYE family have been implicated in the
reduction of trinitrotoluene,9 structural characterization of the
partially reduced cyclic products remains elusive to date. ChxG,
which shows high sequence homology to known members of
OYE family (Figure S10 in SI), therefore could serve as an
excellent model to study how flavoproteins modulate redox
potential to catalyze the reduction of a benzene ring.
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
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Author Contributions
#These authors contributed equally to this work.
Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
Finally, we overexpressed chxH in E. coli (SI and Table S2)
and purified ChxH to near homogeneity (Figure S11 in SI).
ChxH catalyzed efficient reduction of 10 to 1, requiring
NADPH or NADH (Figure S12A in SI) and exhibiting an
optimal pH at 7.2 in 100 mM sodium phosphate (Figure S12B
in SI), and showed no activity toward 11 as an alternative
substrate. Pseudo-first-order kinetic studies under steady state
conditions (SI) showed that plots of initial velocity versus the
concentration of substrates or cofactors all displayed
Michaelis−Menten kinetics, allowing the determination of the
corresponding KM’s, and kcat’s (Figure S13 in SI). Thus, as
summarized in Table S5 in SI, ChxH exhibited apparent KM’s
for 10 at 44 4 μM and 139 23 μM upon saturation of
NADPH and NADH, apparent KM’s for NADPH and NADH
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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We thank the John Innes Center, Norwich, U.K., for providing
the λ-Red-mediated PCR-targeting mutagenesis kit. This work
was supported in part by NIH grant CA106150 and the Natural
Products Library Initiatives at TSRI. M.Y. and Y.Y. were
supported in part by scholarships from the China Scholarship
Council.
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at 34
4 μM and 75
8 μM upon saturation of 10, and
apparent kcat’s at 599
69 min−1 and 20 3 min−1 with
NADPH and NADH, respectively. ChxH was also competent
to catalyze the reverse reaction from 1 to 10, exhibiting
apparent KM’s for 1 at 99 7 μM and 162 32 μM upon
saturation of NADP+ and NAD+, apparent KM’s for NADP+ and
NAD+ at 76 5 μM and 233 37 μM upon saturation of 1,
and apparent kcat’s at 387 23 min−1 and 13 3 min−1 with
NADP+ and NAD+, respectively. ChxH therefore prefers
NADPH (KM = 34 4 μM) to NADH (KM = 75 8 μM)
and 10-to-1 (KM = 44 4 μM and kcat/KM = 14 μM−1 min−1)
to 1-to-10 conversion (KM = 76 5 and kcat/KM = 5.1 μM−1
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ChxG and ChxH catalyzing the last two steps of the pathway
(Figure 3).
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT
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S
* Supporting Information
Complete description of materials and methods, supporting
tables (S1−S5), and supporting figures (S1−S13). This
material is available free of charge via the Internet at http://
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dx.doi.org/10.1021/ol501179w | Org. Lett. 2014, 16, 3072−3075