Angewandte
Chemie
DOI: 10.1002/anie.200702751
Enzyme Promiscuity
Alternate-Site Enzyme Promiscuity**
Andreas Taglieber, Horst Höbenreich, J. Daniel Carballeira, RØgis J. G. Mondire, and
Manfred T. Reetz*
Enzyme promiscuity means, in the broadest terms, the ability
of a given enzyme to catalyze distinctly different chemical
transformations of natural or nonnatural substrates.[1]
Although it was originally thought to be a fairly rare
event,[2] research over the last few years has uncovered
many more examples. It has also become clear that catalytic
promiscuity has implications in evolutionary relationships.[1,3]
This intriguing frontier in enzymology has several important
theoretical and practical facets. For example, the question of
how proteins in nature evolve new functions such as antibiotic
resistance or the ability to degrade man-made chemicals, both
within months or years, is of fundamental significance and has
been studied by applying the methods of directed evolu-
tion.[1c,3] Moreover, the discovery of promiscuous behavior of
wild-type (WT) enzymes or mutants thereof produced by
protein engineering has the potential of expanding the
repertoire of synthetic organic methodologies.[1]
We discovered alternate-site enzyme promiscuity unex-
pectedly when screening the thermostable enzyme tHisF from
Thermotoga maritima for promiscuous behavior. It has a (b/
a)8-barrel structure and constitutes the synthase subunit of a
bienzyme complex involved in the biosynthesis of histidine.[12]
Mechanistic studies have demonstrated that ammonia is
generated in a first step by hydrolysis of glutamine (Gln), a
process catalyzed by the tHisH subunit. The ammonia then
enters tHisF at the lower rim of the barrel structure and
moves to the relatively broad top rim where the enzyme
catalyzes a cyclization reaction in an acid/base manner
(Scheme 1). Asp11 and Asp130 were shown by site-directed
mutagenesis to be essential for this catalytic step, whereas
Asp176 was reported to be important, but not essential.[12]
In all studies reported so far,[1–3] the promiscuous (secon-
dary) reaction has been linked to the binding site of the
reaction for which the enzyme is primarily known, generally
involving some or all of the original catalytically active amino
acids or metal centers. Examples are alkaline phosphatase
catalyzed hydrolysis of p-nitrophenylsulfate,[4] aminopepti-
dase-catalyzed hydrolysis of phosphoesters,[5] lipase-catalyzed
Michael additions of N-,[6] O-,[6] S-,[6] and C-nucleophiles,[7]
aldol additions,[8] oligomerization of siloxanes,[9] racemase-
catalyzed PLP-dependent aldol additions,[10] and arylmalo-
nate decarboxylase catalyzed aldol additions.[11] Many of
these studies involve protein engineering. To the best of our
knowledge, no case of enzyme promiscuity has been reported
in which the known natural catalytically active site is not
involved. Herein we report the first example of this phenom-
enon, which we call alternate-site enzyme promiscuity.
Scheme 1. Natural reaction of the bienzyme complex tHisH–tHisF.[12]
As acid/base catalysis is involved in the natural function of
tHisF, we speculated that this robust enzyme might also show
promiscuous hydrolytic behavior at the natural binding site,
specifically esterase-like activity.[13] As a model reaction we
chose the hydrolysis of p-nitrophenyl esters 1a–e [Eq. (1)].
Activity can be measured easily and accurately by the
standard photometric assay (absorption of p-nitrophenolate
at 405 nm). The rate of the background reaction is relatively
[*] A. Taglieber, H. Höbenreich, Dr. J. D. Carballeira,
Dr. R. J. G. Mondire, Prof. Dr. M. T. Reetz
Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz 1, 45470 Mülheim/Ruhr (Germany)
Fax: (+49)208-306-2985
E-mail: reetz@mpi-muelheim.mpg.de
[**] A.T. and H.H. have contributed equally. We thank R. Sterner
(Universität Regensburg) for providing the plasmids for tHisF and
mutant Cys9Ala/Asp11Cys, N. Dickmann (Max-Planck-Institut für
Bioanorganische Chemie) for MALDI-TOF measurements and M.
Rusek for performing some of the fermentations. This work was
supported by the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie, the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (SPP 1170, Re 359/13-1), and the EU
(IBAAC MCRTN-CT-2003-505020).
Supporting information for thisarticle isavailable on the WWW
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2007, 46, 8597 –8600
ꢀ 2007 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
8597
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