Mechanism and Active Site Residues of GDP-Fucose Synthase
Bibliographic record
Abstract
L-fucose, 6-deoxy-L-galactose, is a key component of many important glycoconjugates including the blood group antigens and the Lewis(X) ligands. The biosynthesis of GDP-L-fucose begins with the action of a dehydratase that converts GDP-D-mannose into GDP-4-keto-6-deoxy-mannose. The enzyme GDP-fucose synthase, GFS, (also known as GDP-4-keto-6-deoxy-D-mannose epimerase/reductase, GMER) then converts GDP-4-keto-6-deoxy-D-mannose into GDP-L-fucose. The GFS reaction involves epimerizations at both C-3'' and C-5'' followed by an NADPH-dependent reduction of the carbonyl at C-4. This manuscript describes studies that elucidate the order of the epimerization steps and the roles of the active site acid/base residues responsible for the epimerizations. An active site mutant, Cys109Ser, produces GDP-6-deoxy-D-altrose as its major product indicating that C-3'' epimerization occurs first and premature reduction of the GDP-4-keto-6-deoxy-D-altrose intermediate becomes competitive with GDP-L-fucose production. The same mutation results in the appearance of a kinetic isotope effect when [3''-(2)H]-GDP-6-deoxy-4-keto-mannose is used as a substrate. This indicates that Cys109 is the base responsible for the deprotonation of the substrate at C-3''. The Cys109Ser mutant also catalyzes a rapid wash-in of solvent derived deuterium into the C-5'' position of GDP-fucose in the presence of NADP(+). This confirms the order of epimerizations and the role of Cys109. Finally, the inactive His179Gln mutant readily catalyzes the wash-out of deuterium from the C-3'' position of [3''-(2)H]-GDP-6-deoxy-4-keto-mannose. Together these results strongly implicate an ordered sequence of epimerizations (C-3'' followed by C-5'') and suggest that Cys109 acts as a base and His179 acts as an acid in both epimerization steps.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".