Asymmetry in catalysis: ‘unidirectional’ amino acid racemases
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
d-Amino acids play widespread structural, functional and regulatory roles in organisms. These d-amino acids often arise through the stereoinversion of the more plentiful l-amino acids catalysed by amino acid racemases and epimerases. Such enzymes are of interest since many are recognized targets for the development of drugs or may be employed industrially in biotransformation reactions. Despite their enzyme–substrate complexes being diastereomers, some racemases and epimerases exhibit a kinetic pseudo-symmetry, binding their enantiomeric or epimeric substrate pairs with roughly equal affinities and catalyzing their stereoinversion with similar turnover numbers. In other cases, this kinetic pseudo-symmetry is absent or may be ‘broken’ by substitution of a catalytic Cys by Ser at the active site of cofactor-independent racemases and epimerases, or by altering the Brønsted base of the catalytic dyad that facilitates deprotonation of the Cys residue. Moreover, a natural Thr-containing l-Asp/Glu racemase was discovered that catalyses ‘unidirectional’ substrate turnover, unlike the typical bidirectional racemases and epimerases. These observations suggest that bidirectional Cys–Cys racemases may be re-engineered into ‘unidirectional’ racemases through substitution of the thiol by a hydroxyl group. Catalysis by such ‘unidirectional’ racemase precursors could then be optimized further by site-directed mutagenesis and directed evolution to furnish useful enzymes for biotechnological applications.
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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 it