Diallyl sulfide, a major flavor ingredient from garlic, was previously shown to inhibit chemically induced carcinogenesis and cytotoxicity in animal model systems. It modulated cytochrome P-450 compositions by inactivating P-450 2E1 and inducing P-450 2B1. The present studies examined the inhibition of P-450 2E1 mediated p-nitrophenol hydroxylase activity by diallyl sulfide and its putative metabolites diallyl sulfoxide and diallyl sulfone (DASO2). Each compound displayed competitive inhibition of p-nitrophenol hydroxylase activity in incubations using liver microsomes from acetone-pretreated male Sprague-Dawley rats. Preincubation of the microsomes with DASO2 inactivated p-nitrophenol hydroxylase activity in a process that was time- and NADPH-dependent and saturable, exhibited pseudo-first-order kinetics, was protected by alternate substrate, was accompanied by a loss of microsomal P-450-CO binding spectrum, and was unaffected by exogenous nucleophile. The Ki value for DASO2 was 188 microM and the maximal rate of inactivation was 0.32 min-1. DASO2 was ineffective in the inactivation of ethoxyresorufin dealkylase, pentoxyresorufin dealkylase, or benzphetamine demethylase activity. Purified P-450 2E1 in a reconstituted system was inactivated in a time- and NADPH-dependent manner by DASO2. The metabolic conversion of diallyl sulfide to the sulfoxide and sulfone was observed in vivo and in vitro. The results suggest that diallyl sulfide inhibits the metabolism of P-450 2E1 substrates by competitive inhibition mechanisms and by inactivating P-450 2E1 via a suicide-inhibitory action of DASO2.

Order parameters for the backbone N-H and C alpha-H bond vectors have been calculated from a 150 ps molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of human type-alpha transforming growth factor in H2O solvent. Two kinds of 'crankshaft motions' of the polypeptide backbone are observed in this MD trajectory. The first involves small-amplitude rocking of the rigid peptide bond due to correlated changes in the backbone dihedral angles psi i-1 and phi i. These high-frequency 'librational crankshaft' motions are correlated with systematically smaller values of motional order parameters for backbone N-H bond vectors compared to C alpha-H bond vectors. In addition, infrequent 'crankshaft flips' of the peptide bond from one local minimum to another are observed for several amino acid residues. These MD simulations demonstrate that comparisons of N-H and C alpha-H order parameters provide a useful approach for identifying crankshaft librational motions in proteins.

Genome sequence/structure alignment results at http://lutece.rutgers.edu/ss_fold_predictions.

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