Mechanistic Differences between Linear vs Spirocyclic Dialkyldiazirine Probes for Photoaffinity Labeling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dialkyldiazirines have emerged as a photo-reactive group of choice for interactome mapping in live cell experiments. Upon irradiation, ‘linear’ dialkyldiazirines produce dialkylcarbenes which are susceptible to both intramolecular reactions and unimolecular elimination processes, as well as diazoalkanes, which also participate in intermolecular labeling. Cyclobutylidene has a nonclassical bonding structure and is stable enough to be captured in bimolecular reactions. Cyclobutanediazirines have more recently been studied as photoaffinity probes based on cyclobutylidene, but the mechanism, especially with respect to the role of putative diazo intermediates, was not fully understood. Here, we show that photolysis (365 nm) of cyclobutanediazirines can produce cyclobutylidene intermediates as evidenced by formation of their expected bimolecular and unimolecular products, including methylenecyclopropane derivatives. Unlike linear diazirines, cyclobutanediazirine photolysis in the presence of tetramethylethylene produces a [2+1] cycloaddition adduct. By contrast, linear diazirines produce diazo compounds upon low temperature photolysis in THF, whereas diazo compounds are not detected in similar photolyses of cyclobutanediazirines. Diazocyclobutane, prepared by independent synthesis, is labile, reactive toward water and capable of protein alkylation. The rate of diazocyclobutane decomposition is not affected by 365 nm light, suggesting that the photochemical conversion of diazocyclobutane to cyclobutylidene is not an important pathway. Finally, chemical proteomic studies revealed that a likely consequence of this primary conversion to a highly reactive carbene is a marked decrease in labeling by cyclobutanediazirine- based probes relative to linear diazirine counterparts both at the individual protein and proteome- wide levels. Collectively, these observations are consistent with a mechanistic picture for cyclobutanediazirine photolysis that involves carbene chemistry with minimal formation of diazo intermediates, and contrasts with the photolyses of linear diazirines where alkylation by diazo intermediates plays a more significant role.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".