Site-directed mutagenesis protease

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. 

The nonstructural region of the precursor, harboring the viral replication machinery, is cut into its mature components in a maturation reaction in which two viral proteases (NS2-pro and NS3/4A-pro) cooperate. Site-directed mutagenesis of an other wise infectious cDNA has shown that both HCV-encoded proteases are necessary for viral infectivity, but most of the attention has so far been focused on one of them a member of the serine protease family (EC 3.4.21) located in the N-terminal region of the viral NS3 protein. 

The family of serine proteases has been subjected to intensive studies of site-directed mutagenesis. These experiments provide unique information about the contributions of individual amino acids to kcat and KM. Some of the clearest conclusions have emerged from studies in subtilisin (Ref. 9), where the oxyanion intermediate is stabilized by t>e main-chain hydrogen bond of Ser 221 and an hydrogen bond from Asn 155 (Ref. 2). Replacement of Asn 155 (e.g., the Asn 155— Ala 155 described in Fig. 7.9) allows for a quantitative assessment of the effect of the protein dipoles on Ag. ... 

Tatsuta, T., and Ogura, T. Dissecting the role of a conserved motif (the second region of homology) in the AAA family of ATPases. Site-directed mutagenesis of the ATP-dependent protease FtsH. /. Biol. 

Figure 7 Sequence requirements of the leader peptides of nisin, mutacin II, lacticin 481, and lacticin 3147 as determined by site-directed mutagenesis. For nisin and mutacin II, mutants that still resulted in full processing of the prepeptides are shown in green, whereas mutants that resulted in abolished lantibiotic production are shown in orange. For lacticin 481, the mutants shown in green were good substrates in vitro for either the bifunctional synthetase LctM or the protease domain of LctT, whereas the mutants in orange were poor substrates. Conserved residues in the leader peptides of subgroups of lantibiotics are indicated in blue and red as described in Figure 6.

Use can be made of the affinities of metals to imidazoles to modify enzyme activity. For example, site-directed mutagenesis was used to add a second histidine to a serine protease in order to enhance the interaction between a transition metal ion and the side chain of His-57 (Higaki et al, 1990). The strengths of association of metals were found to be Cu (21 yM) > Ni (49 /xM) > (128 p.M). This is the order of associa-... 

Another serine protease inhibitor of the al-antitrypsin family (serpin) is heparin cofactor II (HCII), which also forms a 1 1 complex with thrombin, but does not react with factor Xa [4,10]. The rate of inhibition of thrombin is not only increased by heparinoids but also by the related glycosaminoglycan dermatan sulfate. The identification of an inhibitor variant and site-directed mutagenesis studies on HC II cDNA led to the understanding that the binding sites for heparin and dermatan sulfate may be overlapping but not identical. Further proteinase inhibitors interacting with heparinoids are tissue factor pathway inhibitor and protease nexin-1. 

Examples of other recombinant enzymes in which an alteration using site-directed mutagenesis resulted in altered substrate binding efficiencies, rates of catalysis, or stability include carbonic anhydrase (Alexander, Nair Christianson, 1991), lactate dehydrogenase (Feeney, Clarke Holbrook, 1990), and several industrially important proteases (Wells etal., 1987 Siezenera/., 1991 Teplyakovcra/., 1992 Aehle et al., 1993 Rheinnecker et al., 1994). 

Amprenavir is a nonpeptide protease inhibitor that is active against both HIV-1 and HIV-2 fosamprenavir is the prodrug for amprenavir and has better bioavailability. After binding to the active site of the viral protease, it inhibits the processing of viral gag and gag-pol polyprotein precursors, resulting in the production of immature HIV particles that lack the capability to infect other cells. The resistance to the drug results from site-directed mutagenesis primarily at codons 50 and 84, and also at codons 10, 32, 46, 54 and 90. 

Besides these rather complex coenzyme-dependent enzymes, the none-coenzyme requiring protease subtilisin is the most extensively mutated enzyme. The substrate specificity of the enzyme as well as its dependence on pH and its stability were altered by site-directed mutagenesis [72-78]. As the knowledge about exact details of the structure and active site of the enzyme is essential for the application of this method, progress in this field is difficult to achieve. Site-directed mutagenesis as a means of catalyst improvements will be used only after extensive application of conventional optimization procedures. 

KC Cheah, LE Leong, AG Porter. Site-directed mutagenesis suggests close functional relationship between a human rhinovirus 3C cysteine protease and cellular trypsin-like serine proteases. J Biol Chem 265 7180-7187, 1990. 

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