Hydrolytic catalysis

Hydrolytic reactions, which are best documented, include saponification of esters, hydrolysis of amides, and hydrolysis of ethers (glycosides). Except for ester saponification, all the other reactions proceed at a measurable rate only by enzymic catalysis. Hydrolytic enzymes are regular constituents of the digestive tract and lysosomes. They are responsible for the biodegradation of polyesters, polyamides (including polypeptides), polysaccharides and, probably, polyurethanes. 

Inspired by the many hydrolytically-active metallo enzymes encountered in nature, extensive studies have been performed on so-called metallo micelles. These investigations usually focus on mixed micelles of a common surfactant together with a special chelating surfactant that exhibits a high affinity for transition-metal ions. These aggregates can have remarkable catalytic effects on the hydrolysis of activated carboxylic acid esters, phosphate esters and amides. In these reactions the exact role of the metal ion is not clear and may vary from one system to another. However, there are strong indications that the major function of the metal ion is the coordination of hydroxide anion in the Stem region of the micelle where it is in the proximity of the micelle-bound substrate. The first report of catalysis of a hydrolysis reaction by me tall omi cell es stems from 1978. In the years that... 

The transformations described thus far were catalyzed by enzymes in their traditional hydrolytic mode. More recent developments in the area of enzymatic catalysis in nonaqueous media (11,16,33—35) have significantly broadened the repertoire of hydrolytic enzymes. The acyl—enzyme intermediate formed in the first step of the reaction via acylation of the enzyme s active site nucleophile can be deacylated in the absence of water by a number of... 

Until recently, the catalytic role of Asp ° in trypsin and the other serine proteases had been surmised on the basis of its proximity to His in structures obtained from X-ray diffraction studies, but it had never been demonstrated with certainty in physical or chemical studies. As can be seen in Figure 16.17, Asp ° is buried at the active site and is normally inaccessible to chemical modifying reagents. In 1987, however, Charles Craik, William Rutter, and their colleagues used site-directed mutagenesis (see Chapter 13) to prepare a mutant trypsin with an asparagine in place of Asp °. This mutant trypsin possessed a hydrolytic activity with ester substrates only 1/10,000 that of native trypsin, demonstrating that Asp ° is indeed essential for catalysis and that its ability to immobilize and orient His is crucial to the function of the catalytic triad. 

However, a number of limitations are still evident when tetrafluorohorate and hexafluorophosphate ionic liquids are used in homogeneous catalysis. The major aspect is that these anions are still relatively sensitive to hydrolysis. The tendency to anion hydrolysis is of course much less pronounced than that of the chloroalu-minate melts, hut it still occurs and this has major consequences for their use in transition metal catalysis. For example, the [PF ] anion of l-hutyl-3-methylimida-2olium ([BMIM]) hexafluorophosphate was found (in the author s laboratories) to hydrolyze completely after addition of excess water when the sample was kept for 8 h at 100 °C. Gaseous HF and phosphoric acid were formed. Under the same conditions, only small amounts of the tetrafluorohorate ion of [BMlMjjBFJ was converted into HF and boric acid [10]. The hydrolytic formation of HF from the anion of the ionic liquid under the reaction conditions causes the following problems with... 

Poly(L-malate) decomposes spontaneously to L-ma-late by ester hydrolysis [2,4,5]. Hydrolytic degradation of the polymer sodium salt at pH 7.0 and 37°C results in a random cleavage of the polymer, the molecular mass decreasing by 50% after a period of 10 h [2]. The rate of hydrolysis is accelerated in acidic and alkaline solutions. This was first noted by changes in the activity of the polymer to inhibit DNA polymerase a of P. polycephalum [4]. The explanation of this phenomenon was that the degradation was slowest between pH 5-9 (Fig. 2) as would be expected if it were acid/base-catalyzed. In choosing a buffer, one should be aware of specific buffer catalysis. We found that the polymer was more stable in phosphate buffer than in Tris/HCl-buffer. 

In these equations, Dmax is the larger of the summed values of STERIMOL parameters, Bj, for the opposite pair 68). It expresses the maximum total width of substituents. The coefficients of the ct° terms in Eqs. 37 to 39 were virtually equal to that in Eq. 40. This means that the a° terms essentially represent the hydrolytic reactivity of an ester itself and are virtually independent of cyclodextrin catalysis. The catalytic effect of cyclodextrin is only involved in the Dmax term. Interestingly, the coefficient of Draax was negative in Eq. 37 and positive in Eq. 38. This fact indicates that bulky substituents at the meta position are favorable, while those at the para position unfavorable, for the rate acceleration in the (S-cyclodextrin catalysis. Similar results have been obtained for a-cyclodextrin catalysis, but not for (S-cyclodextrin catalysis, by Silipo and Hansch described above. Equation 39 suggests the existence of an optimum diameter for the proper fit of m-substituents in the cavity of a-cyclodextrin. The optimum Dmax value was estimated from Eq. 39 as 4.4 A, which is approximately equivalent to the diameter of the a-cyclodextrin cavity. The situation is shown in Fig. 8. A similar parabolic relationship would be obtained for (5-cyclodextrin catalysis, too, if the correlation analysis involved phenyl acetates with such bulky substituents that they cannot be included within the (5-cyclodextrin cavity. 

Phosphonate analogs to phosphate esters, in which the P—0 bond is formally replaced by a P—C bond, have attracted attention due to their stability toward the hydrolytic action of phosphatases, which renders them potential inhibitors or regulators of metabolic processes. Two alternative pathways, in fact, may achieve introduction of the phosphonate moiety by enzyme catalysis. The first employs the bioisosteric methylene phosphonate analog (39), which yields products related to sugar 1-phosphates such as (71)/(72) (Figure 10.28) [102,107]. This strategy is rather effective because of the inherent stability of (39) as a replacement for (25), but depends on the individual tolerance of the aldolase for structural modification close... 

Because of its importance to carbohydrate technology, biochemistry, and physical organic chemistry, the hydrolytic cleavage of glycosides has been extensively studied with respect to both acid and enzymic catalysis. Reviews on the acid-catalyzed hydrolysis have been presented by BeMiller, Capon, ... 

While catalysis by aspartic proteases involves the direct hydrolytic attack of water on a peptide bond, catalysis... 

Fructose-2,6-bisphosphatase, a regulatory enzyme of gluconeogenesis (Chapter 19), catalyzes the hydrolytic release of the phosphate on carbon 2 of fructose 2,6-bisphosphate. Figure 7-8 illustrates the roles of seven active site residues. Catalysis involves a catalytic triad of one Glu and two His residues and a covalent phos-phohistidyl intermediate. 

When the drug is nonionizable in water, three hydrolytic pathways are available [Eq. (33)] it can degrade by specific acid catalysis represented by the first kinetic term in Eq. (33), water hydrolysis (second term), and specific base catalysis (third term) ... 

Metal ion-catalyzed hydrolytic processes have been studied for a long time, and many interesting systems have been explored which give valuable information about catalysis. However, with very few exceptions the catalysis afforded by these systems in water is disappointing when compared with enzymatic systems where a metal ion cofactor activates a substrate and a nucleophilic or basic group in an acyl or phos-phoryl transfer process. It has been noted that bulk water may not be a good medium to approximate the medium inside the active site of an enzyme where it is now known that the effective dielectric constants resemble those of organic solvents rather than water. 

Catalysis by imidazole in aqueous systems has received widespread attention because of its central position as the catalytic group in many hydrolytic enzymes. Many imidazole derivatives with long aliphatic chains have been synthesized and their catalytic role in the presence of detergents has been reported as models of hydrolytic enzymes. Representative examples of the hydrolysis ofp-nitrophenyl acetate (8) are summarized in Table 2. 

Increased understanding of reaction mechanisms in the 1940s and 1950s pinpointed general acid or base catalysis as likely to be of importance in many hydrolytic reactions. The imidazole nucleus in histidine was the obvious center in proteins to donate or accept protons at physiological pH. The involvement of histidine was shown by photochemical oxidation in the presence of methylene blue (Weil and Buchert, 1951) which destroyed histidine and tryptophan and inactivated chymotrypsin and trypsin. 

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