Enhancing H2O2 Resistance of an Esterase from Pyrobaculum Calidifontis by Structure-Guided Engineering of the Substrate Binding Site
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Appl Microbiol Biotechnol (2017) 101:5689–5697 DOI 10.1007/s00253-017-8299-0 BIOTECHNOLOGICALLY RELEVANT ENZYMES AND PROTEINS Enhancing H2O2 resistance of an esterase from Pyrobaculum calidifontis by structure-guided engineering of the substrate binding site Pengfei Zhou1 & Dongming Lan2 & Grzegorz Maria Popowicz3 & Xuping Wang2 & Bo Yang1 & Yonghua Wang 2 Received: 19 January 2017 /Revised: 6 April 2017 /Accepted: 12 April 2017 /Published online: 17 May 2017 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2017 Abstract Green technologies are attracting increasing at- Introduction tention in industrial chemistry where enzymatic reac- tions can replace dangerous and environmentally un- Oxidation reactions, such as epoxidation, hydroxylation, N- friendly chemical processes. In situ enzymatic synthesis oxidation, S-oxidation, and Baeyer-Villiger oxidation, are at- of peroxycarboxylic acid is an attractive alternative for tractive for organic synthesis of value compounds for science several industrial applications although concentrated and industry purposes (Hernandez et al. 2012). Although the H2O2 can denature the biocatalyst, limiting its useful- high catalytic efficiency of oxidation reactions can be ness. Herein, we report the structure-guided engineering achieved by using chemical methods, the toxicity and envi- of the Pyrobaculum calidifontis esterase (PestE) ronmental pollution arising from side products and reaction substrate binding site to increase its stability and residues deserve our attention. Alternatively, oxidases includ- perhydrolysis activity. The L89R/L40A PestE mutant ing peroxidase (Ullrich et al. 2008), peroxygenase (Kluge showed better tolerance toward concentrated H2O2 com- et al. 2009), P450 (Bernhardt 2006), chloroperoxidase pared with wild-type PestE, and retained over 72% of (Colonna et al. 1992), haloperoxidase (Dembitsky 2003), its initial activity after 24-h incubation with 2 M H2O2. and Baeyer-Villiger monooxygenase (Fraaije et al. 2005)are Surprisingly, the half-life (t1/2,80°C)ofPestEin- promising biocatalysts for these reactions because of their creasedfrom28to54h.Thekcat/Km values of the high catalytic efficiency under mild reaction conditions and mutant increased 21- and 3.4-fold toward pentanoic acid low toxicity to the environment. Additionally, esterases and and H2O2, respectively. This work shows how protein lipases can catalyze the reaction of carboxylic acids and H2O2 engineering can be used to enhance the H2O2 resistance to generate peroxycarboxylic acid, which can transfer its ox- and catalytic efficiency of an enzyme. ygen to olefins (Björkling et al. 1990; Björkling et al. 1992; Moreira et al. 2005; Ankudey et al. 2006;Wangetal.2015), cyclic ketones (Kotlewska et al. 2011; Drozdz et al. 2015), Keywords Pyrobaculum calidifontis . Esterase . Stability . amines (Irimescu and Kato 2004), and organic sulfur com- Structure-guided engineering . Perhydrolysis activity pounds (Nieuwenhuizen 1949; Lou et al. 2008). Thus, in situ enzymatic synthesis of peroxycarboxylic acid by esterases and lipases is an attractive alternative for a number of industrial * Yonghua Wang applications compared with the use of a chemical in situ gen- [email protected] eration method (Björkling et al. 1990; Rusch et al. 2002). Unfortunately, except for its role as a substrate, H O 1 School of Bioscience and Bioengineering, South China University of 2 2 Technology, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China has a strong detrimental effect on the chemical structure of proteins because of its ability to oxidize amino acids. 2 School of Food Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, People’s Republic of China Aminoacids,suchasArg,Pro,Lys,Met,Cys,Tyr,and His, are sensitive to a high concentration of H O ,which 3 Institute of Structural Biology, Helmholtz ZentrumMünchen 2 2 Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Gesundheitund Umwelt (GmbH), destabilizes enzymes and limits their applications in oxi- Ingolstädter Landstrasse l, 85764 Oberschleißheim, Germany dation reactions (Villegas et al. 2000;Kroutiletal.2004; 5690 Appl Microbiol Biotechnol (2017) 101:5689–5697 Kitajima et al. 2008; Hernandez et al. 2012). To solve this and 2-chloro-5,5-dimethyl-1,3-cyclohexanedione problem, several strategies have been developed to (monochlorodimedone) was from Alfa Aesar (Shanghai, increase the tolerance of enzymes toward H2O2. China). All other regents were of analytical grade. Immobilization of enzymes on suitable supporting mate- rials can improve their resistance to extreme reaction con- Expression and purification of PestE and its mutants ditions, while chemical modification of enzymes is an alternative method to achieve similar effects. However, The gene-encoding PestE (GenBank accession number: in most cases, these strategies may sacrifice enzyme ac- AB078331.1) was chemically synthesized and cloned into the tivity for enhanced protein stability (Hernandez et al. pET23a vector as a cellulose-binding domain (CBD) fusion at 2012). Unlike physical and chemical methods, genetic en- the N terminus and His tag at the C terminus. The protein was gineering is a simple way to increase the protein stability expressed in Escherichia coli BL21(DE3). E. coli BL21(DE3) by substituting the H2O2-sensitive amino acid with an cells harboring the plasmid pET23a encoding the target genes insensitive one, and its feasibility has been confirmed by were grown at 37 °C for 8 h in Luria-Bertani (LB) medium many researchers (Villegas et al. 2000; Miyazaki and containing 100 μg ampicillin mL−1, and then the microorgan- Takahashi 2001;Kuoetal.2004;RyanandÓ’Fágáin isms were inoculated into auto-induction medium until the op- 2007; Kitajima et al. 2008; Ogola et al. 2010). The man- tical density (OD600) reached 0.8, and then the gene expression ganese peroxidase from Phanerochaete chrysosporium was induced by setting the temperature at 20 °C for 12 h at showed higher resistance to H2O2 inactivation when the 200 rpm as previously described (Studier 2005). H2O2-sensitive Met in the H2O2-binding pocket was re- Cells were collected, disrupted by sonication, and the pro- placed with Leu (Ryan and Ó’Fágáin 2007). Three mu- tein of interest was recovered by adsorption to cellulose. The tants of horseradish peroxidase, K232N, K241F and CBD tag was removed by proteolysis with 3C protease and T110V, showed higher H2O2 tolerances of 25-, 18-, and centrifugation and the protein was recovered in the superna- 12-fold compared with that of the parent enzyme tant. The recombinant enzyme was further purified by metal (Miyazaki and Takahashi 2001). ion affinity chromatography. The protein concentration in the PestE, an esterase from the hyperthermophilic archeon final preparation was determined using the Lowry Bradford Pyrobaculum calidifontis, has potential industrial applications method (Sedmak and Grossberg 1977) and bovine serum al- because of its extreme stability in the presence of heat and bumin was used as a standard. Mutants were obtained by site- organic solvents (Palm et al. 2011). However, it is not stable directed mutagenesis and expressed exactly as the wild type. in the presence of a high concentration of H2O2, limiting its All mutants were verified by sequencing of the relevant application in peroxycarboxylic acid production. In this study, constructs. we selected PestE as a model enzyme to increase its stability toward H2O2 by engineering its substrate binding pocket by General assays structure-guided mutagenesis. The H2O2-tolerance, thermo- stability, and biochemical characterization of the PestE mu- The stability of PestE and its mutants in the presence of H2O2 tants were investigated. We present a new approach for en- was determined by incubating the test enzyme (0.05 μM) in hancing the H2O2 stability of PestE esterase by introducing phosphate buffer containing different concentrations of H2O2 mutations that allow stabilization of H2O2 in the enzyme ac- (5 mM to 2 M) at room temperature. Samples were withdrawn tive site. Surprisingly, these modifications dramatically en- at different time points and the residual perhydrolysis activity hanced both enzymatic activity and H2O2 stability. was determined. The residual activity was expressed as a frac- tion of the residual activity of the reference sample treated in the same way except for the addition of H2O2. The thermal Materials and methods stability of PestE and its mutants was measured by using pNP butyrate as the substrate. Enzymes were incubated in phos- Chemicals and reagents phate buffer at pH 7.0 at 80 °C for 24 h. Samples were taken from the media at different time intervals. The optimal pH for The artificial substrates p-nitrophenyl (pNP) acetate (C2), the perhydrolysis reaction was determined by varying the pH pNP butyrate (C4), pNP caproate (C6), pNP caprylate (C8), of the pentanoic acid buffer. pNP caprate (C10), pNP laurate (C12), pNP myristate (C14), The temperature dependence of the perhydrolysis reaction pNP palmitate (C16), and oleic acid were purchased from was tested by varying the temperature from 40 to 55 °C. The Sigma-Aldrich (Shanghai, China). Formic acid, acetic acid, dependence of the hydrolysis rate on the length of the aliphatic propanoic acid, butyric acid, pentanoic acid, n-hexylic acid, chain of the carboxylic acid substrate was determined by ex- hydrogen peroxide (30% wt), and sodium bromide were pur- changing the pentanoic acid buffer into a buffer containing the chased from Aladdin Chemistry Co., Ltd. (Shanghai, China), tested acid. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol