Pyruvate kinase: studies on affinity labeling and active-site structure using the rabbit muscle enzyme.

Important advances have been made in recent years in the study of the structure of pyruvate kinase: the amino acid sequence of the enzymes from chicken muscle and yeast have been established and the three-dimensional structure of the cat muscle enzyme has been determined at 0.26 nm resolution. Work in our laboratory has shown that dialdehyde-ADP (oADP) can be used as an affinity label of rabbit muscle pyruvate kinase: if the enzyme is incubated with cold oADP in the presence of high ADP concentrations, dialyzed and then incubated with 14C-oADP, the enzyme inactivates and one mole of radioactive oADP incorporates per mole of enzyme subunit. A labeled peptide with a molecular weight of about 5900 has been purified from a tryptic digest of the modified enzyme. The first 26 residues of the peptide have been sequenced and this sequence is identical to a region in the chicken muscle enzyme and a peptide isolated from the bovine muscle enzyme specifically labeled with trinitrobenzenesulfonate. High homology is also found with a region of the yeast enzyme. All this suggests that the isolated peptide is part of the active site; the modified amino acid, probably a lysine, seems to be located in one of the alfa helices of domain A of the enzyme, according to the x-ray data.

Isolation and sequence determination of an active site peptide of rabbit muscle pyruvate kinase.

Rabbit muscle pyruvate kinase was inactivated by 2', 3'-dialdehyde ADP with the incorporation of one molecule of reagent per enzyme subunit. The inactivated protein was digested with trypsin after reduction and carboxymethylation. The labeled peptide was isolated by gel filtration and further purified by HPLC. The peptide was sequenced both by liquid-phase and gas-phase automatic Edman degradation. A 34-residue peptide was obtained. This peptide is identical to a tryptic peptide labeled with trinitrobenzenesulfonate, isolated and sequenced by Johnson et al. (Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. (1979) 90, 525-530) from bovine muscle pyruvate kinase. Available evidence suggests that dialdehyde ADP labels the enzyme at the same lysine in position 25 of the peptide, as found by Johnson et al. The high homology between the isolated peptide and regions of other pyruvate kinases from low to high eukaryotes supports the idea that this peptide is related to the enzyme active site.