Neurospora crassa enzyme activity

Effects of Allelochemlcals on ATPases. Several flavonoid compounds inhibit ATPase activity that is associated with mineral absorption. Phloretin and quercetin (100 pM) inhibited the plasma membrane ATPase Isolated from oat roots (33). The naphthoquinone juglone was inhibitory also. However, neither ferulic acid nor salicylic acid inhibited the ATPase. Additional research has shown that even at 10 mM salicylic acid inhibits ATPase activity only 10-15% (49). This lack of activity by salicylic acid was substantiated with the plasma membrane ATPase Isolated from Neurospora crassa (50) however, the flavonols fisetln, morin, myricetin, quercetin, and rutin were inhibitory to the Neurospora ATPase. Flavonoids inhibited the transport ATPases of several animal systems also (51-53). Thus, it appears that flavonoids but not phenolic acids might affect mineral transport by inhibiting ATPase enzymes. 

AsnRS was first characterized in the early 1960s in L. arabimsus hy its distinct chromatographic properties from aspartyl-tRNA synthetase and Asn synthetase and, at the end of the decade in E. coli as a protein of 90-100 kDa able to aminoacylate tRNA but not tRNA f / ° The enzyme was further characterized in mitochondria from Neurospora crassa" and in rat liver where tRNA asparaginylation activity was found associated with proteins of Air 35 and 90 kDa. The AsnRS purified from B. stearothermophilus of 127 kDa was characterized as a homodimer az (a = 51 kDa).AsnRSs isolated until now from various prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms show conservation of the homodimeric structure. Investigation of B. stearothermophilus AsnRS allowed the determination of its physicochemical parameters S2o a = 6.6 x 10 s. 

The assimilatory enzyme from the mold Neurospora crassa has been intensively studied for over two decades, particularly by Nason and his collaborators. Thus, Nason and Evans (39) identified FAD as a prosthetic group in the enzyme Nicholas, Nason, and McElroy (40) showed that molybdenum was required for the synthesis of nitrate reductase Nicholas and Nason (41) suggested its presence in the enzyme Garrett and Nason (42) showed that a b-type cytochrome (cytochrome 6557) co-purifies with this nitrate reductase and Nason et al. (11) suggested, from in vitro complementation experiments with nitrate reductaseless mutants, that the enzyme consists of at least two components required for activity. These workers have suggested that the electron transfer pathway is ... 

Several decades ago, the earliest genetic work in molybdenum enzymes identified mutants of two fungi, Aspergillus nidulans (125) and Neurospora crassa (126) that lacked all molybdenum enzyme activities, specifically, nitrate reductase, XDH, and aldehyde oxidase. The mutant N. crassa produces an... 

Nitrite reduction in assimilatory nitrate-reducing Neurospora crassa, Torulopsis nitratophila, Azotobacter vinelandii, and Azotobacter chro-ococcum appears to be catalyzed by enzyme systems which require flavin and metals. The enzyme from N. crassa has been partially purified, and its molecular weight has been estimated to be 300,000 (344, 346, 351, 367). The enzyme reduces both nitrite and hydroxylamine to ammonia and utilizes NADH or NADPH as electron donor. It is reported to be a FAD-dependent enzyme and to contain iron, copper, and active thiol (346, 367). Three moles of NADH are oxidized per mole of nitrite reduced to ammonia. It has been suggested that the reduction of nitrite occurs in three steps, each involving two electrons. Thus, hyponitrite and hydroxylamine have been proposed as successive intermediates in the re-... 

The constmction of synthetic selenocysteine-containing proteins or selenium-containing proteins attracts considerable interest at present, mainly for the reason that it can be used to solve the phase problem in X-ray crystallography. Selenomethionine incorporation has been used mostly uutil now for this purpose. There are also two reports ou uew synthetic selenocysteine-containing proteins. In one case, the active site serine of subtUisin has been converted into a selenocysteine residue by chemical means, with the result that the enzyme gains a predominant esterase instead of protease activity. In the second case, automated peptide synthesis was carried out to produce a peptide in which all seven-cysteine residues of the Neurospora crassa metallothioueiu (Cu) were replaced by selenocysteine. The replacement resulted iu au alteration of both the stoichiometry and the affinity of copper binding. ... 

In the early 1970s Nason and co-workers showed that extracts of nit-1 mutants of Neurospora crassa exhibited nitrate reductase activity when mixed with solutions of other molybdenum enzymes that had been subjected to denaturing conditions (20-23). The isolation and... 

D-Glucosamine 6-phosphate is hydrolyzed by the D-glucose-6-phosphatase of rat-liver mitochondria. The rate of this hydrolysis is about 8 % of that of D-glucose 6-phosphate hydrolysis. A phosphatase which preferentially catalyzes the hydrolysis of D-glucosamine 6-phosphate has been prepared from Neurospora crassa. This enzyme is not stimulated by magnesium ions and has an optimum activity between pH 6 and 7.5. It appears to be distinct from acid, alkaline, and other specific phosphatases. 

The oxidation of 2-nitropropane by the yeast Hansenula mrakii is carried out by a flavoenzyme and produces 2 mol of acetone from 2 mol of substrate and one molecule of 02 that is activated by conversion to superoxide (Kido et al. 1978b Figure 4.50). A similar enzyme has been purified and characterized from the heterothallic ascomycete Neurospora crassa (Gorlatova et al. 1998) 2-nitropropane is the optimal substrate. 

The conversion of cellulase component B into A may be a result of some enzymatic modification of the enzyme molecule. Similar type of in vitro conversion has also been reported, for example, for the extracellular cellulase of Trichoderma viride (38) and the cell-bound invertase of bakers yeast (15). The occurrence of another type of conversion where the reversible association and dissociation of active subunits are operative, has been proven on the intrawall and extracellular invertases of Neurospora crassa (25). 

Dehydroquinase is an enzyme in the pathway responsible for forming aromatic amino acids from acyclic precursors [116]. It is part of a 5-enzyme complex in Neurospora crassa which exhibits the property of co-ordinate activation by the first substrate [117]. The enzyme Aerobacter aerogenes was used by Hanson and Rose [118] to determine the absolute stereochemical course of citric acid biosynthesis. These workers also demonstrated that the elimination of water proceeds in a SYN manner with the prochiral R-proton removed followed by elimination of hydroxide. This was in contrast to the commonly observed anti-elimination of water from most... 

There are no plasma membrane-bound enzymes whose activities are known to be specifically and sufficiently altered to account for growth Inhibition by the sterol inhibitors at sub-MIC doses. A likely candidate is chitin synthetase, but the activity of this enzyme is not reduced in fact, sterol inhibitor-treated fungi contain more glucosamine polymers than controls. However, the altered deposition of chitin (see above references) may reflect a discontinuity between cytoskeletal elements which are believed to be involved in cell wall formation and the plasma membrane, but it is unlikely that this is at the root of growth inhibition since a wall-less slime mutant of Neurospora crassa is as sensitive as the wild-type strain to propiconazole (57TI Cytochrome oxidase and microsomal ATPase are inhibited by high concentrations (10 5,... 

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