Through the Looking Glass: Chiral Recognition of Substrates and Products at the Active Sites of Racemases and Epimerases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unlike most enzymes, which exhibit stereospecific substrate binding, racemases and epimerases bind and catalyze the reversible interconversion of enantiomeric and epimeric pairs of substrates. Over the past 15 years, a growing number of racemase and epimerase structures have been solved, furnishing insights into the nature of chiral recognition of substrates by these enzymes. Those enzymes catalyzing stereoinversion of a carbon acid substrate through a direct 1,1-proton transfer mechanism all bind their substrates in a mirror-image packing orientation. This does not apply generally to racemases and epimerases that use other mechanisms, such as NADH-dependent epimerases that employ a "flipping" mechanism. In general, polar groups are bound and fixed at the three binding determinants on the protein defining a pseudo-mirror plane, while nonpolar groups may be mobile. The hydrogen atoms on each stereocenter are positioned antipodal with respect to the pseudo-mirror plane, making a two-base mechanism imperative. Recognition that mirror-image packing is the common binding mode for enantiomeric or epimeric substrates of these enzymes should inform modelling/docking studies and protein engineering.
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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".