Studies of methylglyoxal synthase: the distribution of enzyme and chemical mechanism of catalysis

Methylgloxal synthase, which catalyzes the conversion of dihydroxyacetone phosphate to methylglyoxal and inorganic phosphate, has been found in several Enterobacteriaceae. The enzyme along with glyoxalase I and II and D-lactate oxidase, therefore, constitute a nonphosphorylated shunt of the normal glycolytic pathwa

Studies on C-Terminal Analysis

Despite the fact that end labelling has been widely used for DNA analyses, and in combination with an appropriate separation technique is central to all methods for DNA sequencing (1), reports of end-labelling of proteins are quite rare. The intrinsically higher chemical diversity of proteins (twenty different amino acids compared with the four bases in DNA) with a wide range of chemical reactivity has impeded the development of such techniques for protein chemists. Such procedures would be useful in both finding the C-terminal fragment for amino terminal sequence analysis, as well as making alignments from partial cleavage maps. This could increase the analytical efficiency of sequencing projects tremendously by allowing workers to concentrate on peptides of particular interest. Selective isolation of the C-terminal peptide followed by amino terminal sequencing is also a potential alternative to direct chemical sequencing (2) from the carboxy terminus as a method for obtaining C-terminal sequence information