Heme-Dependent Chemistry in Aromatic Oxidation

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Abstract of the Parent Research Project Heme-containing enzymes are ubiquitous, contributing to various processes and catalyzing a vast array of oxidative chemistries. Histidine-ligated heme enzymes, such as the heme-dependent aromatic oxygenase (HDAO) superfamily, can use either molecular oxygen or hydrogen peroxide to oxidize their substrates. What is currently not understood are the molecular factors that engender these enzymes with their respective specificities, i.e., after generation of the critical active oxidant, how is a single reaction type catalyzed? The answer to this question will broaden our fundamental understanding of enzyme catalysis, de novo enzyme design, and protein engineering. This application focuses on the structural and mechanistic characterization of three aromatic-oxidizing enzymes of the HDAO superfamily involved in natural product and antimicrobial drug biosynthesis, including antibiotics with a pyrroline moiety or a core quinone structure. These enzymes play essential roles in the biosynthetic pathway of secondary metabolites found in many biologically active natural products and pharmaceutical lead compounds. Our primary goal is to understand the key factors that govern their hydroxylation mechanisms and their differing strategies to form oxidizing intermediates with these enzymes. We have utilized a broad spectrum of approaches to probe the intricate molecular details of these enzyme mechanisms using noncanonical amino acids, substrate analogs, time-resolved UV-vis and EPR spectroscopies, kinetics, and isotope-labeling studies, and we have been successful in trapping on-pathway reaction intermediates in crystallo. The proposed work will test our hypotheses regarding i) how the heme-based oxidant is generated, ii) how oxygen is directed to the substrate, and iii) unravel the structural factors that affect catalysis. The outcome of the proposed studies is an in-depth understanding of these three related catalytic systems to aid the development of scaffolds for rational drug design and discovery processes.