Modulating the pH−Activity Profile of Cellulase by Substitution: Replacing the General Base Catalyst Aspartate with Cysteinesulfinate in Cellulase A from <i>Cellulomonas fimi</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cellulase A (CenA) from Cellulomonas fimi is an inverting glycoside hydrolase and a member of family 6 of the CAZy database classification system. We replaced its putative catalytic base aspartyl residues, Aps392 and Asp216, with cysteinesulfinate using a combination of site-directed mutagenesis and chemical modification to investigate the applicability of this approach for the modulation of enzymatic properties. The substituted cysteinyl residues were oxidized to cysteinesulfinic acid with hydrogen peroxide, and the resulting protein products were demonstrated to retain their native structure. Oxidation of the Asp392Cys mutant enzyme restored 52% of wild-type activity when assessed at pH 7.5, whereas Asp216Cys CenA remained inactive. This suggests that Asp216 is not the catalytic base and provides further support for Asp392 performing this role. Similar substitution of the catalytic acid residue Asp252 or the catalytic nucleophile of the retaining enzyme Cel5A from Thermobifida fusca failed to produce active enzymes. This indicates a potential utility of this approach for uniquely identifying catalytic base residues. The replacement of Asp392 with cysteinesulfinate induced an acidic shift in the pH profile of the enzyme such that this enzyme derivative was more active than wild-type CenA below pH 5.5. These data demonstrate the potential of combining site-directed mutagenesis with chemical modification as a viable approach for the modulation of cellulases, and potentially other glycoside hydrolases, at low pH.
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 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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".