Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology Commons^™

Engineering An Alkane-Hydroxylating Bacterial Monooxygenase: A Tale Of Two Chemistries, Arjun Nanda

Pomona Senior Theses

Toluene / o-xylene monooxyenase (ToMO) from Pseudomonas sp. OX1 is a multimeric metalloenzyme enzyme that efficiently catalyzes the hydroxylation of aromatic hydrocarbons with high specificity. Though included in a larger group of conserved bacterial multicomponent monooxygenases (BMMs) studied as potential biocatalysts for industrial hydrocarbon chemistry, the substrate specificity and oxygenated intermediates of ToMO differ greatly from its well-characterized, alkane-hydroxylating analog sMMO. Despite a shared global topology and near identical active sites, sMMO can cleave inert C-H bonds in alkanes while ToMO cannot - two seemingly similar structures give rise to vastly different chemistries. This work seeks to determine a structural …