This is the first crystallographic indication of the 'base-on' mode of cobalamin binding. An unusually long cobalt-base bond seems to favor homolytic cleavage of the cobalt-carbon bond and therefore to favor radical enzyme catalysis. Reactive radical intermediates can be protected from side reactions by spatial isolation inside the barrel. On the basis of unique direct interactions between the potassium ion and the two hydroxyl groups of the substrate, direct participation of a potassium ion in enzyme catalysis is strongly suggested.

The structure of the adenine-ring-binding site provides a molecular basis for the strict specificity of diol dehydratase for the coenzyme adenosyl group. The superimposition of the structure of the free coenzyme on that of enzyme-bound adeninylpentylcobalamin demonstrated that the tight enzyme-coenzyme interactions at both the cobalamin moiety and adenine ring of the adenosyl group would inevitably lead to cleavage of the cobalt-carbon bond. Rotation of the ribose moiety around the glycosidic linkage makes the 5'-carbon radical accessible to the hydrogen atom of the substrate to be abstracted.

A new nanophase-separated structure with parallel double periodicity has been identified for an undecablock terpolymer in bulk. The polymer includes two long poly(2-vinypyridine) (P) chains on each end, with five short polyisoprene (I) and four short polystyrene (S) chains at the center. This polymer exhibits a hierarchical lamellar structure with two crystallographic periods: 88 nm and 16 nm. The 88 nm period includes one thick P lamella and five thin I-S-I-S-I lamellae, of extremely high orientation.

A two-component multiblock copolymer with undecablockstwo of them on both chain ends are long and nine of them are shortswas successfully prepared by anionic polymerization using the sixstep sequential monomer addition technique. Polymer components are polystyrene (S) and polyisoprene (I), its total molecular weight is 275K, and the overall S/I volume ratio is 0.70/0.30. Microphase-separated structure of the copolymer was observed by transmission electron microscopy and small-angle X-ray scattering, and it was confirmed that the copolymer forms a complex lamellar structure; its long period is 45 nm, which is composed of one thick lamellar domain formed by long polystyrene chains and I-S-I three thin lamellar domains, the length of the short period for I-S lamellae being about one-third of the longer period. This fact shows short block chains at the center favorably adopt a loop conformation over a bridge one. This unique lamellar structure having two length scales must be the first experimentally observed simple hierarchical structure for the block copolymer where the component polymers are connected by covalent bonds.

Substrate binding triggers catalytic radical formation through the cobalt-carbon bond homolysis in coenzyme B12-dependent enzymes. We have determined the crystal structure of the substrate-free form of Klebsiella oxytoca diol dehydratase*cyanocobalamin complex at 1.85 A resolution. The structure contains two units of the heterotrimer consisting of alpha, beta, and gamma subunits. As compared with the structure of its substrate-bound form, the beta subunits are tilted by approximately 3 degrees and cobalamin is also tilted so that pyrrole rings A and D are significantly lifted up toward the substrate-binding site, whereas pyrrole rings B and C are only slightly lifted up. The structure revealed that the potassium ion in the substrate-binding site of the substrate-free enzyme is also heptacoordinated; that is, two oxygen atoms of two water molecules coordinate to it instead of the substrate hydroxyls. A modeling study in which the structures of both the cobalamin moiety and the adenine ring of the coenzyme were superimposed onto those of the enzyme-bound cyanocobalamin and the adenine ring-binding pocket, respectively, demonstrated that the distortions of the Co-C bond in the substrate-free form are already marked but slightly smaller than those in the substrate-bound form. It was thus strongly suggested that the Co-C bond becomes largely activated (labilized) when the coenzyme binds to the apoenzyme even in the absence of substrate and undergoes homolysis through the substrate-induced conformational changes of the enzyme. Kinetic coupling of Co-C bond homolysis with hydrogen abstraction from the substrate shifts the equilibrium to dissociation.