Metallo-β-lactamases (MBLs) hydrolyze most β-lactam antibiotics, and bacteria containing this kind of enzyme pose a serious threat to the public health. The newly identified New Delhi MBL (NDM-1) is a new member of this family that shows tight binding to penicillin and cephalosporins. The rapid dissemination of NDM-1 in clinically relevant bacteria has become a global concern. However, no clinically useful inhibitors against MBLs exist, partly due to the lack of knowledge about the catalysis mechanism of this kind of enzyme. Here we report the crystal structure of this novel enzyme in complex with a hydrolyzed ampicillin at its active site at 1.3-Å resolution. Structural comparison with other MBLs revealed a new hydrolysis mechanism applicable to all three subclasses of MBLs, which might help the design of mechanism based inhibitors.
The extracellular domain of human CD38 is a multifunctional enzyme involved in the metabolism of two Ca2+ messengers, cyclic ADP-ribose (cADPR) and nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NAADP). When NAD is used as a substrate, CD38 predominantly hydrolyzes it to ADP-ribose with a trace mount of cADPR produced through cyclization of the substrate. However, a mutation of a key residue at the active site, E146A, inhibits the hydrolysis activity of CD38 but greatly increases its cyclization activity. To understand the role of the residue, E146, in the catalytic process, we determined the crystal structure of the E146A mutant protein with a substrate analogue, ara-2’F-NAD. The structure captured the enzymatic reaction intermediates in six different conformations in a crystallographic asymmetric unit. The structural results indicate a folding-back process for the adenine ring of the substrate and provides the first multiple snap shots of the process. Our approach of utilizing multiple molecules in the crystallographic asymmetric unit should be generally applicable for capturing the dynamic nature of enzymatic catalysis.
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