DFT Investigation on the Mechanism of the Deacetylation Reaction Catalyzed by LpxC
Bibliographic record
Abstract
LpxC is a key enzyme in the biochemical synthesis of Lipid A, an important outer cell-membrane component found in a number of pathogenic bacteria. Using DFT, we have investigated the binding of the substrate within its active site as well as the deacetylation mechanism it catalyzes. The substrate is found to preferentially coordinate to the active site Zn2+ via its carbonyl oxygen between a Zn2+-bound H2O and an adjacent threonine (Thr191). Furthermore, upon substrate binding a nearby Glu78 residue is found to readily deprotonate the remaining Zn2+-bound H2O. Unlike several related metallopeptidases, the mechanism of LpxC is found to proceed via four steps; (i) initial hydroxylation of the substrates' carbonyl carbon to give a gem-diolate intermediate, (ii) protonation of the amide nitrogen by the histidine His265-H+, (iii) a barrier-less change in the active site-intermediate hydrogen-bond network and finally, (iv) C-N bond cleavage. Notably, the rate-determining step of the mechanism of LpxC is found to be the initial hydroxylation while the final C-N bond cleavage occurs with an overall barrier of 23.6 kJ mol-1. Furthermore, LpxC uses a general acid/base pair mechanism as indicated by the fact that both His265-H+ and Glu78 are accordingly involved.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".