A Sensitive Mass-spectrum Assay to Characterize Engineered Methionine Adenosyltransferases with S-Alkyl Methionine Analogues as Substrates

摘要

Methionine adenosyltransferases (MATs) catalyze the formation of S-adenosyl-L-methionine (SAM) inside living cells. Recently, S-alkyl analogues of SAM have been documented as cofactor surrogates to label novel targets of methyltransferases. However, these chemically synthesized SAM analogues are not suitable for cell-based studies because of their poor membrane permeability. This issue was recently addressed under a cellular setting through a chemoenzymatic strategy to process membrane-permeable S-alkyl analogues of methionine (SAAM) into the SAM analogues with engineered MATs. Here we describe a general, sensitive activity assay for engineered MATs by converting the reaction products into S-alkyl-thioadenosines, followed by HPLC/MS/MS quantification. With this assay, 40 human MAT mutants were evaluated against seven SAAM as potential substrates. The structure-activity-relationship revealed that, besides better engaged SAAM binding by the MAT mutants (lower Km value in contrast to native MATs), the gained activity towards the bulky SAAM stems from their ability to maintain the desired linear SN2 transition state (reflected by higher kcat value). Here the I117A mutant of human MATI was identified as the most active variant for biochemical production of SAM analogues from diverse SAAM.