Truncation and heme pocket mutations reduce production of functional catalase HPII in Escherichia coli.

The subunit of catalase HPII from Escherichia coli is 753 residues in length and contains a core of approximately 500 residues, with high structural similarity to all other heme catalases. To this core are added extensions of approximately 80 and 180 residues at the N- and C-termini, respectively. The tetrameric structure is made up of a pair of interwoven dimers in which 90 N-terminal residues of each subunit are inserted through a loop formed by the hinge region linking the beta-barrel and alpha-helical domains of the adjacent subunit. A high concentration of proline residues is found in the vicinity of the overlap regions. To study the influence of the extended regions on folding and subunit association of HPII, a diversity of modifications have been introduced. Removal of the complete C-terminal domain or the N-terminal extension, either separately or together, effectively creating a small subunit catalase, resulted in no enzyme accumulation. Systematic truncations showed that only nine C-terminal residues (Ile745 to Ala753) could be removed without significantly affecting the accumulation of active enzyme. Removal or even conservative replacements of the side chain of Arg744 significantly reduced the accumulation of active enzyme despite this residue interacting only with the C-terminal domain. Removal of as few as 18 residues from the N-terminus also reduced accumulation of active enzyme. Changes to other residues in the protein, including residues in the heme binding pocket, also reduced the accumulation of active protein without substantially affecting the enzyme specific activity. Implications of these data for the interdependence of subunit folding and subunit-subunit interactions are discussed.