Structural Characterization of the Catalytic Sites of Mononuclear Nonheme Fe Hydroxylases Using ²H-ESEEM

Aromatic amino acid hydroxylases are members of a larger group of enzymes that use a mononuclear nonheme Fe center to catalyze a variety of thermodynamically challenging reactions in which O2 is used in the oxidative transformation of substrates. The hydroxylase enzymes are catalytically active in the ferrous oxidation state and are high-spin. To render the catalytic site EPR-active, we have used nitric oxide (NO) as a surrogate for substrate O2 to form an S=3/2 paramagnetic center. While the continuous-wave (cw)-EPR spectra of NO-enzyme adducts are rather generic, they provide electron spin echo envelope modulation (ESEEM) data that are rich with structural information derived from ligand hyperfine couplings. This chapter will focus on (2)H-ESEEM spectroscopy, an approach that we have taken for assigning these spectra and harvesting the unique information on Fe(II) coordination chemistry that they provide. While these spectroscopic measurements are routine, an emphasis will be placed on the analysis of cw-EPR and (2)H-ESEEM data using an unconstrained nonlinear optimization approach. These analysis methods are based on simple custom "scripts" that run in the MATLAB environment and that use EasySpin, a public-domain EPR simulation package, as their calculation engine. The examples provided here use a strategy that can be adapted for the treatment of most EPR measurements.