The role of enzyme lysyl amino groups in the reaction with alpha 2-macroglobulin.

The primary observation, from our laboratory and others, of the effect of blocking the lysyl amino groups of enzymes is the reduction in the fraction of complexes that are resistant to SDS. The blocked enzyme derivatives do cause the specific proteolysis of the alpha 2M subunit to the 85K/100K fragments, and do cause the appearance of new thiol groups. With respect to the sequence of reaction, we may summarize the results by saying that if the reversible DMM-trypsin is, in fact, a model for the native enzyme, proteolysis can precede formation of the presumed covalent bond between bound enzyme and inhibitor. If our preliminary observations are borne out by later experiments, thiol release may precede covalent bond formation or loss of reactivity with amines, suggesting that an intact thiolester need not be the immediate target for amines; another intermediate, possibly the internal pyroglutamate originally proposed by Howard et al. and seen in model studies, may be an additional, or even the primary, target for covalent bonding with native enzymes. With regard to the "trap" hypothesis, the limited release of thiols in a slow phase is suggestive of enzyme activity within the alpha 2M-protease complex, consistent with the theory. Noncovalent irreversible complexes, however, are not a necessary part of associations seen with lysyl-blocked enzymes (which do cause proteolysis and do release thiols); this result is supported by limited data with noncovalently bound native enzymes. Some fraction of irreversible noncovalently bound enzymes may occur, but our results suggest that although alpha 2M-bound enzymes are unusually sterically hindered, the transformation to the presumed covalent state that appears to depend on intact amino groups, may be sufficient to explain the low dissociation of native enzymes. We feel that more experimental evidence is needed to resolve some of the ambiguities on this question but, we feel the existence of a "trapping" reaction has not been proved. In fact, given the possible existence of equilibria between covalent and noncovalent complexes observed, for example, in soybean trypsin inhibitor, and the very low dissociation constants observed with traditional protein-protein complexes, the question of physically encapsulated structures in alpha 2M may not be resolvable without direct evidence from crystal structures.