Radioactive Phosphorylation of Alcohols to Monitor Biocatalytic Diels-Alder Reactions

Nature has efficiently adopted phosphorylation for numerous biological key processes, spanning from cell signaling to energy storage and transmission. For the bioorganic chemist the number of possible ways to attach a single phosphate for radioactive labeling is surprisingly small. Here we describe a very simple and fast one-pot synthesis to phosphorylate an alcohol with phosphoric acid using trichloroacetonitrile as activating agent. Using this procedure, we efficiently attached the radioactive phosphorus isotope 32P to an anthracene diene, which is a substrate for the Diels-Alderase ribozyme—an RNA sequence that catalyzes the eponymous reaction. We used the 32P-substrate for the measurement of RNA-catalyzed reaction kinetics of several dye-labeled ribozyme variants for which precise optical activity determination (UV/vis, fluorescence) failed due to interference of the attached dyes. The reaction kinetics were analyzed by thin-layer chromatographic separation of the 32P-labeled reaction components and densitometric analysis of the substrate and product radioactivities, thereby allowing iterative optimization of the dye positions for future single-molecule studies. The phosphorylation strategy with trichloroacetonitrile may be applicable for labeling numerous other compounds that contain alcoholic hydroxyl groups

Prebiotic synthesis of phosphoenol pyruvate by α-phosphorylation-controlled triose glycolysis

Phosphoenol pyruvate is the highest-energy phosphate found in living organisms and is one of the most versatile molecules in metabolism. Consequently, it is an essential intermediate in a wide variety of biochemical pathways, including carbon fixation, the shikimate pathway, substrate-level phosphorylation, gluconeogenesis and glycolysis. Triose glycolysis (generation of ATP from glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate via phosphoenol pyruvate) is among the most central and highly conserved pathways in metabolism. Here, we demonstrate the efficient and robust synthesis of phosphoenol pyruvate from prebiotic nucleotide precursors, glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde. Furthermore, phosphoenol pyruvate is derived within an α-phosphorylation controlled reaction network that gives access to glyceric acid 2-phosphate, glyceric acid 3-phosphate, phosphoserine and pyruvate. Our results demonstrate that the key components of a core metabolic pathway central to energy transduction and amino acid, sugar, nucleotide and lipid biosyntheses can be reconstituted in high yield under mild, prebiotically plausible conditions

The presence of terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase in the N-methyl-N-nitrosourea induced leukaemia in BDF1 mice and its effect on the accuracy of the DNA polymerases.

DNA polymerases have been prepared from leukaemic and normal spleens and their fidelity in copying a polyd AT).polyd(AT) template assessed. The leukaemic cytoplasmic DNA polymerases were less accurate than the controls whereas no difference in accuracy was observed in the nuclear DNA polymerases. The preparations of leukaemic cytoplasmic DNA polymerase also contained the enzyme terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase. When this enzyme was removed by further purification the accuracy of the cytoplasmic DNA polymerases increased to that of the controls

Accessibility of chromatin to DNA polymerase I and location of the F1 histone.

The effect of prebound poly-L-lysine upon the template activity of DNA, chromatin and F1 histone-depleted chromatin for E. coli DNA polymerase I has been investigated. Measurements have been made in the absence and presence of 0.1M NaCl. From the results we conclude that only ca 60% of the polylysine-accessible DNA, i.e. 22% of the total DNA of the chromatin, is accessible to the DNA polymerase I and that ca. 30% of the polylysine-accessible DNA, i.e. 11% of the total DNA, is associated with the F1 histone