The sense of the induction of the adducts in Table I (entries 8-10) could be established by correlation13 with (J?)-3-aminobutan-l-ol.314 The results confirm that amine addition does, in fact, take place preferentially on the re face of the crotonate unit, in agreement with related work.1115 This new enantioselective route to /3-amino esters is incontestably one of the most efficient asymmetric carbon-nitrogen bond-forming reactions known to date; furthermore the new 8arylmenthols that we have developed during the course of this work will undoubtedly prove to be powerful and general chiral auxiliaries in other enantioselective processes.

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Bovine liver catalase (BLC), catalase-related allene oxide synthase (cAOS) from Plexaura homomalla, and a recently isolated protein from the cattle pathogen Mycobacterium avium ssp. paratuberculosis (MAP-2744c (MAP)) are all tyrosinate-ligated heme enzymes whose crystal structures have been reported. cAOS and MAP have low (< 20%) sequence similarity to, and significantly different catalytic functions from, BLC. cAOS transforms 8R-hydroperoxy-eicosatetraenoic acid to an allene epoxide, whereas the MAP protein is an organic peroxide-dependent peroxidase. To shed light on the functional differences among these three proteins, we have investigated the heme iron coordination properties of these tyrosinate-ligated heme proteins in their ferric and ferrous states using magnetic circular dichroism and UV-visible absorption spectroscopy. The MAP protein shows remarkable spectral similarities to cAOS and BLC in its native Fe(III) state, but clear differences from ferric His93Tyr Mb, which may be attributed to the presence of an Arg+-Nω-H … O-Tyr (proximal heme axial ligand) hydrogen bond in the first three heme proteins. Furthermore, the spectra of Fe(III)-CN−, Fe(III)-NO, Fe(II)-NO (except for five-coordinate MAP), Fe(II)-CO, and Fe(II)-O2 states of cAOS and MAP, but not H93Y Mb, are also similar to the corresponding six-coordinate complexes of BLC, suggesting that a tyrosinate (Tyr-O−) is the heme axial ligand trans to the bound ligands in these complexes. The Arg+-Nω-H to −O-Tyr hydrogen bond would be expected to modulate the donor properties of the proximal tyrosinate oxyanion and, combined with the subtle differences in the catalytic site structures, affect the activities of cAOS, MAP and BLC.

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