Neuraminidase Substrate Promiscuity Permits a Mutant <i>Micromonospora viridifaciens</i> Enzyme To Synthesize Artificial Carbohydrates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mutation of the nucleophilic amino acid residue tyrosine to the small nonpolar residue glycine (Y370G) in the active site of Micromonospora viridifaciens neuraminidase (MvNA) produces an efficient catalyst for the transfer of N-acetylneuraminic acid from an artificial substrate (i.e., phenyl N-acetyl-β-D-neuraminide) to a sugar acceptor (e.g., D-lactose, D-glucose, D-mannose, D-raffinose, D-allose, or D-fructose) to give N-acetyl-α-neuraminide coupled carbohydrate products. In addition, this mutant enzyme (MvNA Y370G) catalyzes the transfer of a sugar residue from the artificial substrate 2-fluorophenyl N-acetyl-β-D-neuraminide to methyl glycopyranoside acceptors. Interestingly, when trans-glycosylation reactions are conducted in aqueous solutions containing 30% (v/v) acetonitrile, the α-anomeric acceptors of methyl glucopyranoside and galactopyranoside generate higher product yields than do their corresponding β-anomers. Specifically, a 64 h reaction with 2-fluorophenyl N-acetyl-β-D-neuraminide as the limiting reagent and the acceptors methyl α-d-galactopyranoside, methyl α-D-glucopyranoside, or methyl α-D-mannopyranoside gives trans-glycosylation product yields of 22%, 31%, or 34%, respectively. With methyl α-D-galactopyranoside as the acceptor, trans-glycosylations catalyzed by both MvNA Y370G and a 2,6-sialyltransferase yield identical products, which we identified as methyl N-acetyl-α-D-neuraminyl-(2 → 6)-α-D-galactopyranoside. The MvNA Y370G-catalyzed coupling of N-acetylneuraminic acid to these three methyl α-d-glycopyranoside acceptors is favored by factors of 18–27-fold over the competing hydrolysis reaction. These coupling efficiencies likely arise from nonselective interactions between the acceptor glycopyranoside and MvNA Y370G, which preferentially places a carbohydrate hydroxyl group rather than water in close proximity to the active site where this functionality intercepts the nascent neuraminyl oxacarbenium ion that is formed during cleavage of the glycosidic bond in the aryl N-acetyl-β-D-neuraminide donor. The ability to transfer N-acetylneuraminic acid from a stable and readily accessible donor to acceptor carbohydrates that are not substrates for sialyltransferases is one step on the path for the production of pseudohuman glycoproteins from nonmammalian cell lines.
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".