Protein promoting vibrations in enzyme catalysis--a conserved evolutionary motif.

A computational method to identify residues important in creating a protein promoting vibration (PPV) in enzymes was previously developed and applied to horse liver alcohol dehydrogenase (HLADH), resulting in the identification of eight important residues. From these residues, we define a sequence motif, the PPV generating sequence, and find it to be unique and general to a larger group of alcohol dehydrogenases from diverse sources, demonstrating that nature has selected for the PPV generating sequence.