New insights into the reaction mechanism catalyzed by the glutamate racemase enzyme: pH titration curves and classical molecular dynamics simulations.

The mechanism of the reactions catalyzed by the pyridoxal-phosphate-independent amino acid racemases and epimerases faces the difficult task of deprotonating a relatively low acidicity proton, the amino acid's alpha-hydrogen, with a relatively poor base, a cysteine. In this work, we propose a mechanism for one of these enzymes, glutamate racemase (MurI), about which many controversies exist, and the roles that its active site residues may play. The titration curves and the pK1/2 values of all of the ionizable residues for different structures leading from reactants to products have been analyzed. From these results a concerted mechanism has been proposed in which the Cys70 residue would deprotonate the alpha-hydrogen of the substrate while, at the same time, being deprotonated by the Asp7 residue. To study the consistency of this mechanism classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have been carried out along with pK1/2 calculations on the MD-generated structures.