Enzyme surface rigidity tunes the temperature dependence of catalytic rates.

The structural origin of enzyme adaptation to low temperature, allowing efficient catalysis of chemical reactions even near the freezing point of water, remains a fundamental puzzle in biocatalysis. A remarkable universal fingerprint shared by all cold-active enzymes is a reduction of the activation enthalpy accompanied by a more negative entropy, which alleviates the exponential decrease in chemical reaction rates caused by lowering of the temperature. Herein, we explore the role of protein surface mobility in determining this enthalpy-entropy balance. The effects of modifying surface rigidity in cold- and warm-active trypsins are demonstrated here by calculation of high-precision Arrhenius plots and thermodynamic activation parameters for the peptide hydrolysis reaction, using extensive computer simulations. The protein surface flexibility is systematically varied by applying positional restraints, causing the remarkable effect of turning the cold-active trypsin into a variant with mesophilic characteristics without changing the amino acid sequence. Furthermore, we show that just restraining a key surface loop causes the same effect as a point mutation in that loop between the cold- and warm-active trypsin. Importantly, changes in the activation enthalpy-entropy balance of up to 10 kcal/mol are almost perfectly balanced at room temperature, whereas they yield significantly higher rates at low temperatures for the cold-adapted enzyme.

Catalytic Adaptation of Psychrophilic Elastase.

The class I pancreatic elastase from Atlantic salmon is considered to be a cold-adapted enzyme in view of the cold habitat, the reduced thermostability of the enzyme, and the fact that it is faster than its mesophilic porcine counterpart at room temperature. However, no experimental characterization of its catalytic properties at lower temperatures has actually been reported. Here we use extensive computer simulations of its catalytic reaction, at different temperatures and with different peptide substrates, to compare its characteristics with those of porcine pancreatic elastase, with which it shares 67% sequence identity. We find that both enzymes have a preference for smaller aliphatic residues at the P1 position, while the reaction rate with phenylalanine at P1 is predicted to be substantially lower. With the former class of substrates, the calculated reaction rates for salmon enzyme are consistently higher than those of the porcine ortholog at all temperatures examined, and the difference is most pronounced at the lowest temperature. As observed for other cold-adapted enzymes, this is caused by redistribution of the activation free energy in terms of enthalpy and entropy and can be linked to differences in the mobility of surface-exposed loops in the two enzymes. Such mobility changes are found to be reflected by characteristic sequence conservation patterns in psychrophilic and mesophilic species. Hence, calculations of mutations in a single surface loop show that the temperature dependence of the catalytic reaction is altered in a predictable way.

Entropy and Enzyme Catalysis.

The role played by entropy for the enormous rate enhancement achieved by enzymes has been debated for many decades. There are, for example, several confirmed cases where the activation free energy is reduced by around 10 kcal/mol due to entropic effects, corresponding to a rate enhancement of ∼107 compared to the uncatalyzed reaction. However, despite substantial efforts from both the experimental and theoretical side, no real consensus has been reached regarding the origin of such large entropic contributions to enzyme catalysis. Another remarkable instance of entropic effects is found in enzymes that are adapted by evolution to work at low temperatures, near the freezing point of water. These cold-adapted enzymes invariably show a more negative entropy and a lower enthalpy of activation than their mesophilic orthologs, which counteracts the exponential damping of reaction rates at lower temperature. The structural origin of this universal phenomenon has, however, remained elusive. The basic problem with connecting macroscopic thermodynamic quantities, such as activation entropy and enthalpy derived from Arrhenius plots, to the 3D protein structure is that the underlying detailed (microscopic) energetics is essentially inaccessible to experiment. Moreover, attempts to calculate entropy contributions by computer simulations have mostly focused only on substrate entropies, which do not provide the full picture. We have recently devised a new approach for accessing thermodynamic activation parameters of both enzyme and solution reactions from computer simulations, which turns out to be very successful. This method is analogous to the experimental Arrhenius plots and directly evaluates the temperature dependence of calculated reaction free energy profiles. Hence, by extensive molecular dynamics simulations and calculations of up to thousands of independent free energy profiles, we are able to extract activation parameters with sufficient precision for making direct comparisons to experiment. We show here that the agreement with the measured quantities, for both enzyme catalyzed and spontaneous solution reactions, is quite remarkable. Importantly, we can now address some of the most spectacular entropy effects in enzymes and clarify their detailed microscopic origin. Herein, we discuss as examples the conversion of cytidine to uridine catalyzed by cytidine deaminase and reactions taking place on the ribosome, namely, peptide bond formation and GTP hydrolysis by elongation factor Tu. It turns out that the large entropy contributions to catalysis in these cases can now be rationalized by our computational approach. Finally, we address the problem of cold adaptation of enzyme reaction rates and prove by computational experiments that the universal activation enthalpy-entropy phenomenon originates from mechanical properties of the outer protein surface.

Thermodynamics of the Purine Nucleoside Phosphorylase Reaction Revealed by Computer Simulations.

Enzymes are able to catalyze chemical reactions by reducing the activation free energy, yielding significant increases in the reaction rates. This can thermodynamically be accomplished by either reducing the activation enthalpy or increasing the activation entropy. The effect of remote mutations on the thermodynamic activation parameters of human purine nucleoside phosphorylase is examined using extensive molecular dynamics and free energy simulations. More than 2700 independent reaction free energy profiles for six different temperatures have been calculated to obtain high-precision computational Arrhenius plots. On the basis of these, the activation enthalpies and entropies were computed from linear regression of the plots with ΔG⧧ as a function of 1/T, and the obtained thermodynamic activation parameters are in very good agreement with those from experiments. The Arrhenius plots immediately show that the 6-oxopurines (INO and GUO) have identical slopes, whereas the 6-aminopurine (ADO) has a significantly different slope, indicating that the substrate specificity is related to the difference in thermodynamic activation parameters. Furthermore, the calculations show that the human PNP specificity for 6-oxopurines over 6-aminopurines originates from significant differences in electrostatic preorganization. The effect of the remote double mutation, K22E and H104R (E:R), has also been examined, as it alters human PNP toward the bovine PNP. These residues are situated on the protein surface, 28-35 Å from the active site, and the mutation alters the enthalpy-entropy balance with little effect on the catalytic rates. It is thus quite remarkable that the empirical valence bond method can reproduce the enthalpies and entropies induced by these long-range mutations.

Computer Simulations Reveal Substrate Specificity of Glycosidic Bond Cleavage in Native and Mutant Human Purine Nucleoside Phosphorylase.

Purine nucleoside phosphorylase (PNP) catalyzes the reversible phosphorolysis of purine ribonucleosides and 2'-deoxyribonucleosides, yielding the purine base and (2'-deoxy)ribose 1-phosphate as products. While this enzyme has been extensively studied, several questions with respect to the catalytic mechanism have remained largely unanswered. The role of the phosphate and key amino acid residues in the catalytic reaction as well as the purine ring protonation state is elucidated using density functional theory calculations and extensive empirical valence bond (EVB) simulations. Free energy surfaces for adenosine, inosine, and guanosine are fitted to ab initio data and yield quantitative agreement with experimental data when the surfaces are used to model the corresponding enzymatic reactions. The cognate substrates 6-aminopurines (inosine and guanosine) interact with PNP through extensive hydrogen bonding, but the substrate specificity is found to be a direct result of the electrostatic preorganization energy along the reaction coordinate. Asn243 has previously been identified as a key residue providing substrate specificity. Mutation of Asn243 to Asp has dramatic effects on the substrate specificity, making 6-amino- and 6-oxopurines equally good as substrates. The principal effect of this particular mutation is the change in the electrostatic preorganization energy between the native enzyme and the Asn243Asp mutant, clearly favoring adenosine over inosine and guanosine. Thus, the EVB simulations show that this particular mutation affects the electrostatic preorganization of the active site, which in turn can explain the substrate specificity.

Protein surface softness is the origin of enzyme cold-adaptation of trypsin.

Life has effectively colonized most of our planet and extremophilic organisms require specialized enzymes to survive under harsh conditions. Cold-loving organisms (psychrophiles) express heat-labile enzymes that possess a high specific activity and catalytic efficiency at low temperatures. A remarkable universal characteristic of cold-active enzymes is that they show a reduction both in activation enthalpy and entropy, compared to mesophilic orthologs, which makes their reaction rates less sensitive to falling temperature. Despite significant efforts since the early 1970s, the important question of the origin of this effect still largely remains unanswered. Here we use cold- and warm-active trypsins as model systems to investigate the temperature dependence of the reaction rates with extensive molecular dynamics free energy simulations. The calculations quantitatively reproduce the catalytic rates of the two enzymes and further yield high-precision Arrhenius plots, which show the characteristic trends in activation enthalpy and entropy. Detailed structural analysis indicates that the relationship between these parameters and the 3D structure is reflected by significantly different internal protein energy changes during the reaction. The origin of this effect is not localized to the active site, but is found in the outer regions of the protein, where the cold-active enzyme has a higher degree of softness. Several structural mechanisms for softening the protein surface are identified, together with key mutations responsible for this effect. Our simulations further show that single point-mutations can significantly affect the thermodynamic activation parameters, indicating how these can be optimized by evolution.

Accurate Computation of Thermodynamic Activation Parameters in the Chorismate Mutase Reaction from Empirical Valence Bond Simulations.

Chorismate mutase (CM) enzymes have long served as model systems for benchmarking new methods and tools in computational chemistry. Despite the enzymes' prominence in the literature, the extent of the roles that activation enthalpy and entropy play in catalyzing the conversion of chorismate to prephenate is still subject to debate. Knowledge of these parameters is a key piece in fully understanding the mechanism of chorismate mutases. Within this study, we utilize EVB/MD free energy perturbation calculations at a range of temperatures, allowing us to extract activation enthalpies and entropies from an Arrhenius plot of activation free energies of the reaction catalyzed by a monofunctional Bacillus subtilis CM and the promiscuous enzyme isochorismate pyruvate lyase of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In comparison to the uncatalyzed reaction, our results show that both enzyme-catalyzed reactions exhibit a substantial reduction in activation enthalpy, while the effect on activation entropy is relatively minor, demonstrating that enzyme-catalyzed CM reactions are enthalpically driven. Furthermore, we observe that the monofunctional CM from B. subtilis more efficiently catalyzes this reaction than its promiscuous counterpart. This is supported by a structural analysis of the reaction pathway at the transition state, from which we identified key residues explaining the enthalpically driven nature of the reactions and also the difference in efficiencies between the two enzymes.

Towards Rational Computational Engineering of Psychrophilic Enzymes.

Cold-adapted enzymes from psychrophilic species achieve their high catalytic efficiency at low temperature by a different partitioning of the activation free energy into its enthalpic and entropic components, compared to orthologous mesophilic enzymes. Their lower activation enthalpy, partly compensated by an increased entropic penalty, has been suggested to originate from changes in flexibility of the protein surface. Multiple sequence alignments of psychrophilic and mesophilic enzymes also show characteristic motifs located in surface loops of the protein. Here, we use computer simulations to examine the effects of a number of designed surface mutations of psychrophilic and mesophilic elastases on the temperature dependence of the catalyzed peptide cleavage reaction. For each of 14 mutant enzyme variants we report calculations of their thermodynamic activation parameters. The results show that substitution of psychrophilic loop residues into the mesophilic enzyme consistently changes both the activation parameters and loop flexibilities towards the former, and vice versa for opposite substitutions.

A comparative study of cold- and warm-adapted Endonucleases A using sequence analyses and molecular dynamics simulations.

The psychrophilic and mesophilic endonucleases A (EndA) from Aliivibrio salmonicida (VsEndA) and Vibrio cholera (VcEndA) have been studied experimentally in terms of the biophysical properties related to thermal adaptation. The analyses of their static X-ray structures was no sufficient to rationalize the determinants of their adaptive traits at the molecular level. Thus, we used Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations to compare the two proteins and unveil their structural and dynamical differences. Our simulations did not show a substantial increase in flexibility in the cold-adapted variant on the nanosecond time scale. The only exception is a more rigid C-terminal region in VcEndA, which is ascribable to a cluster of electrostatic interactions and hydrogen bonds, as also supported by MD simulations of the VsEndA mutant variant where the cluster of interactions was introduced. Moreover, we identified three additional amino acidic substitutions through multiple sequence alignment and the analyses of MD-based protein structure networks. In particular, T120V occurs in the proximity of the catalytic residue H80 and alters the interaction with the residue Y43, which belongs to the second coordination sphere of the Mg2+ ion. This makes T120V an amenable candidate for future experimental mutagenesis.

Qgui: A high-throughput interface for automated setup and analysis of free energy calculations and empirical valence bond simulations in biological systems.

Structural information and activity data has increased rapidly for many protein targets during the last decades. In this paper, we present a high-throughput interface (Qgui) for automated free energy and empirical valence bond (EVB) calculations that use molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for conformational sampling. Applications to ligand binding using both the linear interaction energy (LIE) method and the free energy perturbation (FEP) technique are given using the estrogen receptor (ERα) as a model system. Examples of free energy profiles obtained using the EVB method for the rate-limiting step of the enzymatic reaction catalyzed by trypsin are also shown. In addition, we present calculation of high-precision Arrhenius plots to obtain the thermodynamic activation enthalpy and entropy with Qgui from running a large number of EVB simulations.