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Structural and kinetic characterization of Porphyromonas gingivalis glutaminyl cyclase

  • Sebastiaan Lamers ORCID logo , Qiaoli Feng , Yili Cheng , Sihong Yu , Bo Sun , Maxwell Lukman , Jie Jiang and David Ruiz-Carrillo ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: April 7, 2021

Abstract

Porphyromonas gingivalis is a bacterial species known to be involved in the pathogenesis of chronic periodontitis, that more recently has been as well associated with Alzheimer’s disease. P. gingivalis expresses a glutaminyl cyclase (PgQC) whose human ortholog is known to participate in the beta amyloid peptide metabolism. We have elucidated the crystal structure of PgQC at 1.95 Å resolution in unbound and in inhibitor-complexed forms. The structural characterization of PgQC confirmed that PgQC displays a mammalian fold rather than a bacterial fold. Our biochemical characterization indicates that PgQC uses a mammalian-like catalytic mechanism enabled by the residues Asp149, Glu182, Asp183, Asp218, Asp267 and His299. In addition, we could observe that a non-conserved Trp193 may drive differences in the binding affinity of ligands which might be useful for drug development. With a screening of a small molecule library, we have identified a benzimidazole derivative rendering PgQC inhibition in the low micromolar range that might be amenable for further medicinal chemistry development.


Corresponding author: David Ruiz-Carrillo, Department of Biological Sciences, School of Science, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, Jiangsu215123, China, E-mail:

Funding source: Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the support received at the BL17 and BL18U of the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation research (Qi-Sheng Wang 2018) facility.

  1. Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.

  2. Research funding: Research fund of the department of biology of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.

  3. Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/hsz-2020-0298).


Received: 2020-09-03
Accepted: 2021-03-16
Published Online: 2021-04-07
Published in Print: 2021-06-25

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