CONSPECTUS
The seven decades of research on the mechanism of HMG-CoA Reductase (HMGR) provided a detailed reaction pathway for what is one of the most biomedically important and mechanistically most complex enzymes. HMGR is the target of statins that are prescribed to improve the quality of life of millions of people worldwide and, more recently, has been identified as a target for the development of antimicrobial agents.
The impact of advances in diverse research areas, such as molecular biology and computational chemistry, are reflected in the maturation of mechanistic proposals for HMGR. Thus, the development of state-the-art methods in enzyme mechanism research can be traced by following the development of the HMGR mechanism. Similarly, the questions raised about these mechanism proposals reflect the limitations of these methods.
The mechanism of HMGR, a four-electron oxidoreductase, has been uncovered to be unique and far more complex than originally thought. The reaction contains multiple chemical steps, coupled to large- scale domain motions of the homodimeric enzyme. The first proposals for the HMGR mechanism were based on kinetic and labeling experiments, drawing analogies to the mechanism of known dehydrogenases. Advances in molecular biology and bioinformatics enabled site-directed mutagenesis experiments and protein sequence analysis which identified catalytically important glutamate, aspartate, and histidine residues that in turn generated new and more complicated mechanistic proposals.
With the development of protein crystallography, HMGR crystal structures were solved to reveal the spatial organization of the active site with an unexpected lysine residue lying at its center. The multitude of crystal structures led to more and more complex mechanistic proposals but the inherent limitations of the protein crystallography left a number of questions unresolved. For example, the proposed mechanisms change based on the protonation state of the active site glutamate residue, which cannot be clearly determined from the crystal structures.
As computational analysis of large biomolecules become more feasible, application of methods such as hybrid quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) calculations to the HMGR mechanism have led to the most detailed mechanistic proposal yet. As these methodologies continue to improve, their power to study enzyme mechanism in conjunction with protein crystallography is enormous. Nevertheless, even the most current mechanistic proposal is yet incomplete due to limitations of the current computational methodologies. Thus, HMGR serves as a model for how combination of increasingly sophisticated experimental and computational methods can elucidate very complex enzyme mechanisms.