ABSTRACT:The mechanism behind the observed inactivation of human P450 2B6 by phencyclidine (PCP) has been evaluated over the past 2 decades. The scope of the current investigation was to contribute to the fundamental knowledge of PCP oxidation and perhaps the mechanism behind P450 inactivation. To study the chemistry of PCP oxidation, we subjected PCP to the Fenton reagent. Under Fenton chemistry conditions, oxidation on all three PCP rings was observed by liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). When PCP was incubated with the Fenton system in the presence of glutathione (GSH), three GSH-PCP conjugates were identified. Subsequent LC-MS/MS analysis of these conjugates revealed two species that had GSH attached to the cyclohexane ring of PCP and a third conjugate in which GSH was adducted to the piperidine ring. When PCP was incubated across a panel of P450 enzymes, several enzymes, including P450s 2D6 and 3A4, were able to catalyze the formation of the PCP iminium ion, whereas P450s 2B6 and 2C19 were exclusively able to hydroxylate secondary carbons on the cyclohexane ring of PCP. Subsequent mechanistic experiments revealed that only P450s 2B6 and 2C19 demonstrated loss of catalytic activity after preincubation with 10 M PCP. Finally, investigation of P450 2B6 inactivation using structural analogs of PCP revealed that blocking the para-carbon atom on the cyclohexane ring of PCP from oxidation protected the P450 2B6 from inactivation, which suggests that a reactive intermediate generated during the hydroxylation of the cyclohexane ring may be linked to the mechanism of inactivation of P450 2B6 by PCP.The biotransformation of phencyclidine, PCP (Fig. 1), by liver proteins was shown to result in the formation of reactive metabolites leading to P450 inactivation and the formation of covalent adducts with hepatic macromolecules more than 20 years ago (Castagnoli et al., 1997). Originally, covalent binding and enzyme inactivation was thought to occur via alkylation of protein-based nucleophiles by an iminium ion metabolite, M4 (Fig. 1), that arose from the P450-dependent two-electron ␣-carbon oxidation of PCP (Sayre et al., 1997). This hypothesis was supported by the formation of PCP iminium-cyanide adducts and the observation that the presence of cyanide in microsomal incubations protected against the formation of covalent adducts with proteins (Ward et al., 1982b;Hoag et al., 1984). However, subsequent studies demonstrated that the P450 inactivation by the PCP iminium ion (PCP-Im) required the presence of NADPH (Hoag et al., 1984;Osawa and Coon, 1989;Sayre et al., 1991), which inferred that metabolism of PCP beyond the iminium species was required for P450 inactivation.Later, the PCP mechanism-based inactivation of P450 2B6, using purified, recombinant human P450 enzyme, was investigated in great detail (Jushchyshyn et al., 2003). Through a series of experiments, it was shown that P450 2B6 was inactivated via covalent modification of the P450 2B6 apoprotein. Moreover, inclusion of cyanide in the pu...