Heme-copper oxidase (HCO) catalyzes the natural reduction of oxygen to water using a heme-copper center. Despite decades of research on HCO's, the role of nonheme metal and Nature's choice of copper over other metals like iron remains unclear. Here, we use a biosynthetic model of HCO in myoglobin that selectively binds different nonheme metals to demonstrate 30-fold and 11-fold enhancements in oxidase activity of Cu- and Fe-bound HCO mimics respectively, as compared to Zn-bound mimics. Detailed electrochemical, kinetic and vibrational spectroscopic studies, in tandem with theoretical DFT calculations demonstrate that the nonheme metal not only donates electrons to oxygen but also activates it for efficient O-O bond cleavage. Furthermore, the higher redox potential of copper and the enhanced weakening of O-O bond from the higher electron density in the d-orbital of copper are central to its higher oxidase activity over iron. This work resolves a long-standing question in bioenergetics, and renders a chemical-biological basis for designing future oxygen reduction catalysts.

HNO has broad biological effects and pharmacological activities. Direct HNO probes for in vivo applications were recently reported, which are CuII-based complexes having fluorescence reporters with reaction to HNO resulting in CuI systems and the release of NO. Their coordination environments are similar to that in Cu,Zn-superoxide dismutase (SOD), which plays a significant role in cellular HNO/NO conversion. However, none of these conversion mechanisms are known. A quantum chemical investigation was performed here to provide structural, energetic, and electronic profiles of HNO/NO conversion pathways via the first CuII-based direct HNO probe. Results not only are consistent with experimental observations but also provide numerous structural and mechanistic details unknown before. Results also suggest the first HNO/NO conversion mechanism for Cu,Zn-SOD, as well as useful guidelines for future design of metal-based HNO probes. These results shall facilitate development of direct HNO probes and studies of HNO/NO conversions via metal complexes and metalloproteins.

The interconversion of NO and HNO, via copper zinc superoxide dismutase (CuZnSOD), is important in biomedicine and for HNO detection. Many mechanistic questions, including the decades‐long debate on reversibility, were resolved in this work. Calculations of various active‐site and full‐protein models show that the basic mechanism is proton‐coupled electron transfer with a computed barrier of 10.98 kcal mol−1, which is in excellent agreement with experimental results (10.62 kcal mol−1), and this nonheme protein‐mediated reaction has many significant mechanistic differences compared with the conversions mediated by heme proteins due to geometric and electronic factors. The reasons for the irreversible nature of this conversion and models with the first thermodynamically favorable and kinetically feasible mechanism for the experimental reverse reaction were discovered. Such results are the first for nonheme enzyme mediated HNO to NO conversions, which shall facilitate other related studies and HNO probe development.

Oxygen is an important element in most biologically significant molecules and experimental solid-state 17O NMR studies have provided numerous useful structural probes to study these systems. However, computational predictions of solid-state 17O NMR chemical shift tensor properties are still challenging in many cases and in particular each of the prior computational work is basically limited to one type of oxygen-containing systems. This work provides the first systematic study of the effects of geometry refinement, method and basis sets for metal and non-metal elements in both geometry optimization and NMR property calculations of some biologically relevant oxygen-containing compounds with a good variety of XO bonding groups, X= H, C, N, P, and metal. The experimental range studied is of 1455 ppm, a major part of the reported 17O NMR chemical shifts in organic and organometallic compounds. A number of computational factors towards relatively general and accurate predictions of 17O NMR chemical shifts were studied to provide helpful and detailed suggestions for future work. For the studied various kinds of oxygen-containing compounds, the best computational approach results in a theory-versus-experiment correlation coefficient R2 of 0.9880 and mean absolute deviation of 13 ppm (1.9% of the experimental range) for isotropic NMR shifts and R2 of 0.9926 for all shift tensor properties. These results shall facilitate future computational studies of 17O NMR chemical shifts in many biologically relevant systems, and the high accuracy may also help refinement and determination of active-site structures of some oxygen-containing substrate bound proteins.