Kinetic Detection of Orthogonal Protein and Chemical Coordinates in Enzyme Catalysis: Double Mutants of Soybean Lipoxygenase

[Image: see text] Soybean lipoxygenase-1 (SLO-1) is a paradigmatic enzyme system for studying the contribution of hydrogen tunneling to enzymatic proton-coupled electron transfer processes. In this study, the impact of pairs of double mutants on the properties of SLO-1 is presented. Steady-state rates and their deuterium kinetic isotope effects (KIEs) have been measured for the bimolecular reaction of enzyme with free substrate (k(cat)/K(m)) and compared to the unimolecular rate constant, k(cat). A key kinetic finding is that the competitive KIEs on the second-order rate constant (k(cat)/K(m)) are all reduced from (D)k(cat) and, despite large changes in rate and activation parameters, remain essentially unaltered under a variety of conditions. These data implicate a protein reaction coordinate that is orthogonal to the chemical reaction coordinate and controls the concentration of the active enzyme. This study introduces a new means to interrogate the alteration of conformational landscapes that can occur following site-specific mutagenesis.