Active-Site and Protein Models

APPLICATIONS TO ENZYMATIC REACTIONS 2.3.1. Active-Site and Protein Models 

The understanding of the catalytic function of enzymes is a prime objective in biomolecular science. In the last decade, significant developments in computational approaches have made quantum chemistry a powerful tool for the study of enzymatic mechanisms. In all applications of quantum chemistry to proteins, a key concept is the active site, i.e. a local region where the chemical reactivity takes place. The concept of the active site makes it possible to scale down large enzymatic systems to models small enough to be handled by accurate quantum chemistry methods. 

However, the active site is only a conceptual tool and the assignment of the active-site atoms is more or less arbitrary. It is not possible to know beforehand which residues and protein interactions that will turn out to be important for the studied reaction. Hybrid QM/MM methods have been used to extend the active site only models by incorporating larger parts of the protein matrix in studies of enzymatic reactions [19-22], The problem to select active-site residues appears both for active-site and QM/MM models, but in the latter, explicit effects of the surrounding protein (i.e. atoms outside the active-site selection) can at least be approximately evaluated. As this and several other contributions in this volume show, this is in many cases highly desirable. 

The present chapter reviews applications in biocatalysis of the ONIOM method. The focus is on studies performed in our research group, in most cases using the two-layer ONIOM(QM MM) approach as implemented in Gaussian [23], The studied systems include methane monooxygenase (MMO), ribonucleotide reductase (RNR) [24, 25], isopenicillin N synthase (IPNS) [26], mammalian Glutathione peroxidase (GPx) [27,28], Bi2-dependent methylmalonyl-CoA mutase [29] and PLP-dependent P-lyase [30], These systems will be described in more detail in the following sections. ONIOM applications to enzymatic systems performed by other research groups will be only briefly described. 

In the ONIOM(QM MM) scheme as described in Section 2.2, the protein is divided into two subsystems. The QM region (or model system ) contains the active-site selection and is treated by quantum mechanics (here most commonly the density functional B3LYP [31-34]). The MM region (referred to as the real system ) is treated with an empirical force field (here most commonly Amber 96 [35]). The real system contains the surrounding protein (or selected parts of it) and some solvent molecules. To analyze the effects of the protein on the catalytic reactions, we have in general compared the results from ONIOM QM MM models with active-site QM-only calculations. Such comparisons make it possible to isolate catalytic effects originating from e.g. the metal center itself from effects of the surrounding protein matrix. 

---