Towards a better understanding of the substrate specificity of the UDP-<i>N</i>-acetylglucosamine C4 epimerase WbpP
Bibliographic record
Abstract
WbpP is the only genuine UDP-GlcNAc (UDP-N-acetylglucosamine) C4 epimerase for which both biochemical and structural data are available. This represents a golden opportunity to elucidate the molecular basis for its specificity for N-acetylated substrates. Based on the comparison of the substrate binding site of WbpP with that of other C4 epimerases that convert preferentially non-acetylated substrates, or that are able to convert both acetylated and non-acetylated substrates equally well, specific residues of WbpP were mutated, and the substrate specificity of the mutants was determined by direct biochemical assays and kinetic analyses. Most of the mutations tested were anticipated to trigger a significant switch in substrate specificity, mostly towards a preference for non-acetylated substrates. However, only one of the mutations (A209H) had the expected effect, and most others resulted in enhanced specificity of WbpP for N-acetylated substrates (Q201E, G102K, Q201E/G102K, A209N and S143A). One mutation (S144K) totally abolished enzyme activity. These data indicate that, although all residues targeted in the present study turned out to be important for catalysis, determinants of substrate specificity are not confined to the substrate-binding pocket and that longer range interactions are essential in allowing proper positioning of various ligands in the binding pocket. Hence prediction or engineering of substrate specificity solely based on sequence analysis, or even on modelling of the binding pocket, might lead to incorrect functional assignments.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".