Download MendeleyS-Adenosyl-S-carboxymethyl-L-homocysteine: a novel cofactor found in the putative tRNA-modifying enzyme CmoA.
Byrne, R.T., Whelan, F., Aller, P., Bird, L.E., Dowle, A., Lobley, C.M., Reddivari, Y., Nettleship, J.E., Owens, R.J., Antson, A.A., Waterman, D.G.(2013) Acta Crystallogr D Biol Crystallogr 69: 1090-1098
- PubMed: 23695253
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1107/S0907444913004939
- Primary Citation of Related Structures:
4IWN - PubMed Abstract:
Uridine at position 34 of bacterial transfer RNAs is commonly modified to uridine-5-oxyacetic acid (cmo(5)U) to increase the decoding capacity. The protein CmoA is involved in the formation of cmo(5)U and was annotated as an S-adenosyl-L-methionine-dependent (SAM-dependent) methyltransferase on the basis of its sequence homology to other SAM-containing enzymes. However, both the crystal structure of Escherichia coli CmoA at 1.73 Å resolution and mass spectrometry demonstrate that it contains a novel cofactor, S-adenosyl-S-carboxymethyl-L-homocysteine (SCM-SAH), in which the donor methyl group is substituted by a carboxymethyl group. The carboxyl moiety forms a salt-bridge interaction with Arg199 that is conserved in a large group of CmoA-related proteins but is not conserved in other SAM-containing enzymes. This raises the possibility that a number of enzymes that have previously been annotated as SAM-dependent are in fact SCM-SAH-dependent. Indeed, inspection of electron density for one such enzyme with known X-ray structure, PDB entry 1im8, suggests that the active site contains SCM-SAH and not SAM.
Organizational Affiliation:
York Structural Biology Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, University of York, Heslington YO10 5DD, England.
