期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:2002
卷号:99
期号:10
页码:6579-6584
DOI:10.1073/pnas.052150499
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:Although incorporation of amino acid analogs provides a powerful means of producing new protein structures with interesting functions, many amino acid analogs cannot be incorporated easily by using the wild-type aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase (aaRS). To be able to incorporate specific amino acid analogs site-specifically, it is useful to build a mutant aaRS that preferentially activates the analog compared with the natural amino acids. Experimental combinatorial studies to find such mutant aaRSs have been successful but can easily become costly and time-consuming. In this article, we describe the clash opportunity progressive (COP) computational method for designing a mutant aaRS to preferentially take up the analog compared with the natural amino acids. To illustrate this COP procedure, we apply it to the design of mutant Methanococcus jannaschii tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase (M.jann-TyrRS). Because the three-dimensional structure for M.jann-TyrRS was not available, we used the STRUCTFAST homology modeling procedure plus molecular dynamics with continuum solvent forces to predict the structure of wild-type M.jann-TyrRS. We validate this structure by predicting the binding site for tyrosine and calculating the binding energies of the 20 natural amino acids, which shows that tyrosine binds the strongest. With the COP design algorithm we then designed a mutant tyrosyl tRNA synthetase to activate O-methyl-L-tyrosine preferentially compared with L-tyrosine. This mutant [Y32Q, D158A] is similar to the mutant designed with combinatorial experiments, [Y32Q, D158A, E107T, L162P], by Wang et al. [Wang, L., Brock, A., Herberich, B. & Schultz, P. G. (2001) Science 292, 498-500]. We predict that the new one will have much greater activity while retaining significant discrimination between O-methyl-L-tyrosine and tyrosine.