Modeling temperature dependent kinetic isotope effects for hydrogen transfer in a series of soybean lipoxygenase mutants: The effect of anharmonicity upon transfer distance

Soybean lipoxygenase-1 (SLO) catalyzes the oxidation of linoleic acid. The rate-limiting step in this transformation is the net abstraction of the pro-S hydrogen atom from the center of the 1,5-pentadienyl moiety in linoleic acid. The large deuterium kinetic isotope effect (KIE) for this step appears in the first order rate constant (Dkcat = 81 ± 5 at T = 25 °C). Furthermore, the KIE and the rate for protium abstraction are weakly temperature dependent (EA,D − EA,H = 0.9 ± 0.2 kcal/mol and EA,H = 2.1 ± 0.2 kcal/mol, respectively). Mutations at a hydrophobic site about 13 Å from the active site Fe(III), Ile553, induce a marked temperature dependence that varies roughly in accordance with the degree to which the residue is changed in bulk from the wild type Ile. While the temperature dependence for these mutants varies from the wild type enzyme, the magnitude of the KIE at 25 °C is on the same order of magnitude. A hydrogen tunneling model [Kuznetsov, A.M., Ulstrup, J. Can. J. Chem. 77 (1999) 1085-1096] is utilized to model the KIE temperature profiles for the wild type SLO and each Ile553 mutant. Hydrogenic wavefunctions are modeled using harmonic oscillators and Morse oscillators in order to explore the effects of anharmonicity upon computed kinetic observables used to characterize this hydrogen transfer.