25 research outputs found
Understanding the substrate specificity of the heparan sulfate sulfotransferases by an integrated biosynthetic and crystallographic approach
Heparan sulfates (HSs) have potential therapeutic value as anti-inflammatory and antimetastasis drugs, in addition to their current use as anticoagulants. Recent advances in chemoenzymatic synthesis of HS provide a way to conveniently produce homogenous HS with different biological properties. Crystal structures of sulfotransferases involved in this process are providing atomic detail of their substrate binding clefts and interactions with their HS substrates. In theory, the flexibility of this method can be increased by modifying the specificities of the sulfotransferases based on the structures, thereby producing a new array of products
Uncovering Biphasic Catalytic Mode of C 5 -epimerase in Heparan Sulfate Biosynthesis
Heparan sulfate (HS), a highly sulfated polysaccharide, is biosynthesized through a pathway involving several enzymes. C5-epimerase (C5-epi) is a key enzyme in this pathway. C5-epi is known for being a two-way catalytic enzyme, displaying a āreversibleā catalytic mode by converting a glucuronic acid to an iduronic acid residue, and vice versa. Here, we discovered that C5-epi can also serve as a one-way catalyst to convert a glucuronic acid to an iduronic acid residue, displaying an āirreversibleā catalytic mode. Our data indicated that the reversible or irreversible catalytic mode strictly depends on the saccharide substrate structures. The biphasic mode of C5-epi offers a novel mechanism to regulate the biosynthesis of HS with the desired biological functions
MA-SAM: Modality-agnostic SAM Adaptation for 3D Medical Image Segmentation
The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a foundation model for general image
segmentation, has demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance across numerous
natural image segmentation tasks. However, SAM's performance significantly
declines when applied to medical images, primarily due to the substantial
disparity between natural and medical image domains. To effectively adapt SAM
to medical images, it is important to incorporate critical third-dimensional
information, i.e., volumetric or temporal knowledge, during fine-tuning.
Simultaneously, we aim to harness SAM's pre-trained weights within its original
2D backbone to the fullest extent. In this paper, we introduce a
modality-agnostic SAM adaptation framework, named as MA-SAM, that is applicable
to various volumetric and video medical data. Our method roots in the
parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy to update only a small portion of
weight increments while preserving the majority of SAM's pre-trained weights.
By injecting a series of 3D adapters into the transformer blocks of the image
encoder, our method enables the pre-trained 2D backbone to extract
third-dimensional information from input data. The effectiveness of our method
has been comprehensively evaluated on four medical image segmentation tasks, by
using 10 public datasets across CT, MRI, and surgical video data. Remarkably,
without using any prompt, our method consistently outperforms various
state-of-the-art 3D approaches, surpassing nnU-Net by 0.9%, 2.6%, and 9.9% in
Dice for CT multi-organ segmentation, MRI prostate segmentation, and surgical
scene segmentation respectively. Our model also demonstrates strong
generalization, and excels in challenging tumor segmentation when prompts are
used. Our code is available at: https://github.com/cchen-cc/MA-SAM
Molecular Mechanism of Substrate Specificity for Heparan Sulfate 2- O -Sulfotransferase
Heparan sulfate (HS) is an abundant polysaccharide in the animal kingdom with essential physiological functions. HS is composed of sulfated saccharides that are biosynthesized through a complex pathway involving multiple enzymes. In vivo regulation of this process remains unclear. HS 2-O-sulfotransferase (2OST) is a key enzyme in this pathway. Here, we report the crystal structure of the ternary complex of 2OST, 3ā²-phosphoadenosine 5ā²-phosphate, and a heptasaccharide substrate. Utilizing site-directed mutagenesis and specific oligosaccharide substrate sequences, we probed the molecular basis of specificity and 2OST position in the ordered HS biosynthesis pathway. These studies revealed that Arg-80, Lys-350, and Arg-190 of 2OST interact with the N-sulfo groups near the modification site, consistent with the dependence of 2OST on N-sulfation. In contrast, 6-O-sulfo groups on HS are likely excluded by steric and electrostatic repulsion within the active site supporting the hypothesis that 2-O-sulfation occurs prior to 6-O-sulfation. Our results provide the structural evidence for understanding the sequence of enzymatic events in this pathway
Homogeneous low-molecular-weight heparins with reversible anticoagulant activity
Low-molecular-weight heparins (LMWHs) are carbohydrate-based anticoagulants clinically used to treat thrombotic disorders, but impurities, structural heterogeneity or functional irreversibility can limit treatment options. We report a series of synthetic LMWHs prepared by cost-effective chemoenzymatic methods. The high activity of one defined synthetic LMWH against human factor Xa (FXa) was reversible in vitro and in vivo using protamine, demonstrating that synthetically accessible constructs can have a critical role in the next generation of LMWHs