Role of Ligand-Driven Conformational Changes in Enzyme Catalysis: Modeling the Reactivity of the Catalytic Cage of Triosephosphate Isomerase

[Image: see text] We have previously performed empirical valence bond calculations of the kinetic activation barriers, ΔG(‡)(calc), for the deprotonation of complexes between TIM and the whole substrate glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate (GAP, Kulkarni et al.J. Am. Chem. Soc.2017, 139, 10514–1052528683550). We now extend this work to also study the deprotonation of the substrate pieces glycolaldehyde (GA) and GA·HP(i) [HP(i) = phosphite dianion]. Our combined calculations provide activation barriers, ΔG(‡)(calc), for the TIM-catalyzed deprotonation of GAP (12.9 ± 0.8 kcal·mol(–1)), of the substrate piece GA (15.0 ± 2.4 kcal·mol(–1)), and of the pieces GA·HP(i) (15.5 ± 3.5 kcal·mol(–1)). The effect of bound dianion on ΔG(‡)(calc) is small (≤2.6 kcal·mol(–1)), in comparison to the much larger 12.0 and 5.8 kcal·mol(–1) intrinsic phosphodianion and phosphite dianion binding energy utilized to stabilize the transition states for TIM-catalyzed deprotonation of GAP and GA·HP(i), respectively. This shows that the dianion binding energy is essentially fully expressed at our protein model for the Michaelis complex, where it is utilized to drive an activating change in enzyme conformation. The results represent an example of the synergistic use of results from experiments and calculations to advance our understanding of enzymatic reaction mechanisms.