Aerobic respiration in bacteria, Archaea, and mitochondria is performed by oxygen reductase members of the heme-copper oxidoreductase superfamily. These enzymes are redox-driven proton pumps which conserve part of the free energy released from oxygen reduction to generate a proton motive force. The oxygen reductases can be divided into three main families based on evolutionary and structural analyses (A-, B- and C-families), with the B- and C-families evolving after the A-family. The A-family utilizes two proton input channels to transfer protons for pumping and chemistry, whereas the B- and C-families require only one. Generally, the B- and C-families also have higher apparent oxygen affinities than the A-family. Here we use whole cell proton pumping measurements to demonstrate differential proton pumping efficiencies between representatives of the A-, B-, and C-oxygen reductase families. The A-family has a coupling stoichiometry of 1 H
+
/e
-
, whereas the B- and C-families have coupling stoichiometries of 0.5 H
+
/e
-
. The differential proton pumping stoichiometries, along with differences in the structures of the proton-conducting channels, place critical constraints on models of the mechanism of proton pumping. Most significantly, it is proposed that the adaptation of aerobic respiration to low oxygen environments resulted in a concomitant reduction in energy conservation efficiency, with important physiological and ecological consequences.
Bacterial heme-copper terminal oxidases react quickly with NO to form a heme-nitrosyl complex, which, in some of these enzymes, can further react with a second NO molecule to produce N2O. Previously, we characterized the heme a3-NO complex formed in cytochrome ba3 from Thermus thermophilus and the product of its low-temperature illumination. We showed that the photolyzed NO group binds to CuB(I) to form an end-on NO-CuB or side-on copper-nitrosyl complex which is likely to represent the binding characteristics of the second NO molecule at the heme-copper active site. Here we present a comparative study with cytochrome bo3 from Escherichia coli. Both terminal oxidases are shown to catalyze the same two-electron reduction of NO to N2O. The EPR and resonance Raman signatures of the heme o3-NO complex are comparable to those of the a3-NO complex. However, low-temperature FTIR experiments reveal that photolysis of the heme o3-NO complex does not produce a CuB-nitrosyl complex, but that instead, the NO remains unbound in the active-site cavity. Additional FTIR photolysis experiments on the heme-nitrosyl complexes of these terminal oxidases, in the presence of CO demonstrate that an [o3–NO • OC–CuB] tertiary complex can form in bo3 but not in ba3. We assign these differences to a greater iron-copper distance in the reduced form of bo3 compared to that of ba3. Because this difference in metal-metal distance does not appear to affect the NO reductase activity, our results suggest that the coordination of the second NO to CuB is not an essential step of the reaction mechanism.
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