Effects of point mutation on enzymatic activity: correlation between protein electronic structure and motion in chorismate mutase reaction.

Assignment of particular roles to catalytic residues is an important requirement in clearly understanding enzyme functions. Therefore, predicting the catalytic activities of mutant variants is a fundamental challenge in computational biochemistry. Although site-directed mutagenesis is widely used for studying enzymatic activities and other important classes of protein function, interpreting mutation experiments is usually difficult mainly due to side effects induced by point mutations. Because steric and, in many cases, electrostatic effects may affect the local, fine geometries conserved in wild-type proteins that are usually believed to be thermodynamically stable, simply reducing a loss in catalytic activity into clear elements is difficult. To address these important but difficult issues, we performed a systematic ab initio QM/MM computational analysis combined with MD-FEP simulations and all-electron QM calculations for the entire protein matrix. We selected chorismate mutase, one of the simplest and well-known enzymes, to discuss the details of mutational effects on the enzymatic reaction process. On the basis of the reliable free energy profiles of the wild-type enzyme and several mutant variants, we analyzed the effects of point mutations relative to electronic structure and protein dynamics. In general, changes in geometrical parameters introduced by a mutation were usually limited to the local mutational site. However, this local structural modification could affect the global protein dynamics through correlated motions of particular amino acid residues even far from the mutation site. Even for mutant reactions with low catalytic activity, transition state stabilization was observed as a result of conformational modifications and reorganization around the active site. As for the electrostatic effect created by the polar protein environment, the wild-type enzyme was most effectively designed to stabilize the transition state of the reactive substrate, and the effect of global polarization in the electronic structure was found to be a small catalytic element during the process. As electrostatic media for optimum catalysis, both wild-type and mutant variant proteins were generally robust against external electrostatic perturbations. Protein structures have a certain flexibility, which allows them to slightly modulate their conformations to maximize the transition state stabilization in response to the steric perturbations induced by mutations.