The redox potential of selenocystine in unconstrained cyclic peptides
The redox potential of selenocystine in unconstrained cyclic peptides
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DOI:
10.1002/anie.199708831
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发表时间:
1997-05-02
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Moroder, L
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Besse, D;Siedler, F;Moroder, L
Selenocysteine (Sec) can be viewed as the 21st amino acid in terms of ribosome-mediated protein synthesis.[’, It is present in numerous prokaryotic and eukaryotic proteins, and nature uses the UGA termination codon to specify the insertion of this selenoamino acid rather than a posttranslational modification mechanism. Most of the selenoproteins identified so far are redox enzymes, in which the low pK, value of the selenol function (5.73 for Sec vs. 8.53 for Cys) confers unique biochemical properties. However, the redox potential of selenocysteine itself as well as of selenocysteine-containing peptides and proteins has not yet been determined. In the present study we measured the apparent redox potential of selenocystine in peptidic structures using the strongly reducing dithiol dithiotreitol (DTT) as reference redox system.Previous studies on aliphatic and aromatic selenols have clearly shown that the strong acidity and the resulting high nucleophilicity of selenols is responsible for the observed catalytic activity of selenols in thiol-disulfide interchange reactions with strongly reducing dithi~ ls.‘~] This redox activity requires regeneration of the catalytic selenol from the diselenide, at least to some extent. In fact, diselenides were found to be reduced by strongly reducing dithiols like DTT in aqueous solution at pH 7.6, L4] whereas monothiols cannot reduce diselenides to any significant extentc3’This was fully confirmed even in the case of a selenocystine-containing peptide dimer, which was only partially reduced with a 103-fold excess of glutathione at pH 7.6. r51 This partial reduction by glutathione is apparently sufficient to maintain in living cells a concentration of selenocysteine suitable for its bioincorporation into selenoproteins. In fact, with