Abstract
BACKGROUND: Calicheamicins (CAL) are enedyine natural products with potent antibiotic and cytotoxic activity, used in anticancer therapy. The O-methyltransferase CalO6 is proposed to catalyze methylation of the hydroxyl moiety at the C2 position of the orsellinic acid group of CAL.
RESULTS: Crystals of CalO6 diffracted non-isotropically, with the usable data extending to 3.4 Å. While no single method of crystal structure determination yielded a structure of CalO6, we were able to determine its structure by using molecular replacement-guided single wavelength anomalous dispersion by using diffraction data from native crystals of CalO6 and a highly non-isomorphous mercury derivative. The structure of CalO6 reveals the methyltransferase fold and dimeric organization characteristic of small molecule O-methyltransferases involved in secondary metabolism in bacteria and plants. Uncommonly, CalO6 was crystallized in the absence of S-adenosylmethionine (SAM; the methyl donor) or S-adenosylhomocysteine (SAH; its product).
CONCLUSIONS: Likely as a consequence of the dynamic nature of CalO6 in the absence of its cofactor, the central region of CalO6, which forms a helical lid-like structure near the active site in CalO6 and similar enzymes, is not observed in the electron density. We propose that this region controls the entry of SAM into and the exit of SAH from the active site of CalO6 and shapes the active site for substrate binding and catalysis.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-15-2015
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12900-015-0040-6
Funding Information
This work was supported by a National Science Foundation grant CAREER MCB-1149427 (to S.G.-T.), by startup funds from the College of Pharmacy at the University of Kentucky (to O.V.T. and S.G.-T.), and by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant GM20011 (to C.T.W.).
Repository Citation
Tsodikov, Oleg V.; Hou, Caixia; Walsh, Christopher T.; and Garneau-Tsodikova, Sylvie, "Crystal Structure of O-Methyltransferase CalO6 from the Calicheamicin Biosynthetic Pathway: A Case of Challenging Structure Determination at Low Resolution" (2015). Pharmaceutical Sciences Faculty Publications. 39.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/ps_facpub/39
The supporting information contains a figure showing the coomasie blue-stained 15 % Tris-HCl SDS-PAGE gel of the purified CalO6 protein used for crystallization studies.
Notes/Citation Information
Published in BMC Structural Biology, v. 15, article 13, p. 1-7.
© Tsodikov et al. 2015
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.