Structural and Kinetic Evidence That Catalytic Reaction of Human UDP-glucose 6-Dehydrogenase Involves Covalent Thiohemiacetal and Thioester Enzyme Intermediates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Biosynthesis of UDP-glucuronic acid by UDP-glucose 6-dehydrogenase (UGDH) occurs through the four-electron oxidation of the UDP-glucose C6 primary alcohol in two NAD(+)-dependent steps. The catalytic reaction of UGDH is thought to involve a Cys nucleophile that promotes formation of a thiohemiacetal enzyme intermediate in the course of the first oxidation step. The thiohemiacetal undergoes further oxidation into a thioester, and hydrolysis of the thioester completes the catalytic cycle. Herein we present crystallographic and kinetic evidence for the human form of UGDH that clarifies participation of covalent catalysis in the enzymatic mechanism. Substitution of the putative catalytic base for water attack on the thioester (Glu(161)) by an incompetent analog (Gln(161)) gave a UGDH variant (E161Q) in which the hydrolysis step had become completely rate-limiting so that a thioester enzyme intermediate accumulated at steady state. By crystallizing E161Q in the presence of 5 mm UDP-glucose and 2 mm NAD(+), we succeeded in trapping a thiohemiacetal enzyme intermediate and determined its structure at 2.3 Å resolution. Cys(276) was covalently modified in the structure, establishing its role as catalytic nucleophile of the reaction. The thiohemiacetal reactive C6 was in a position suitable to become further oxidized by hydride transfer to NAD(+). The proposed catalytic mechanism of human UGDH involves Lys(220) as general base for UDP-glucose alcohol oxidation and for oxyanion stabilization during formation and breakdown of the thiohemiacetal and thioester enzyme intermediates. Water coordinated to Asp(280) deprotonates Cys(276) to function as an aldehyde trap and also provides oxyanion stabilization. Glu(161) is the Brønsted base catalytically promoting the thioester hydrolysis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".