The protonation state of catalytic residues in the resting state of KasA revisited: detailed mechanism for the activation of KasA by its own substrate.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the causative pathogen of tuberculosis, the second leading cause of death from an infectious disease globally. β-Ketoacyl ACP synthase I (KasA) is essential for the survival of M. tuberculosis, because it is one of the key enzymes in the biosynthetic pathway of mycolic acid, the building block of the cell wall in M. tuberculosis. To distinguish among the various suggested mechanisms of KasA that are based on different protonation states of the active site, we characterize its resting state by various theoretical approaches ranging from first-principle-based quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical molecular dynamics simulations (QM/MM MD) with large QM parts to force field-based MD and free energy perturbation computations. In contrast to a previous study that used less reliable semiempirical approaches in combination with smaller QM parts, our improved computations predict that the most important active site residues, Cys171 and His311, are neutral. Because the neutral catalytic residues are too unreactive to attack the substrate, the question of how their activation is achieved arises. Combining our computed results with structural information about the malonyl binding pocket, we devised a detailed model about the activation mechanism. A conformational change of Phe404 possibly triggered by the substrate is central for the activation because it switches KasA to the sufficiently reactive zwitterionic state.