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Updated: Jun 4, 2025

Preparation of Stable Bicyclic Aziridinium Ions and Their Ring-Opening for the Synthesis of Azaheterocycles
Published on: August 22, 2018
Characterization and structural analysis of a versatile aromatic prenyltransferase for imidazole-containing
Wenxue Wang1,2, Peng Wang3, Chuanteng Ma1
1Key Laboratory of Marine Drugs Ministry of Education, School of Medicine and Pharmacy, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, P R China.
Abstract:
Prenylation modifications of natural products play essential roles in chemical diversity and bioactivities, but imidazole modification prenyltransferases are not well investigated. Here, we discover a dimethylallyl tryptophan synthase family prenyltransferase, AuraA, that catalyzes the rare dimethylallylation on the imidazole moiety in the biosynthesis of aurantiamine. Biochemical assays validate that AuraA could accept both cyclo-(L-Val-L-His) and cyclo-(L-Val-DH-His) as substrates, while the prenylation modes are completely different, yielding C2-regular and C5-reverse products, respectively. Cryo-electron microscopy analysis of AuraA and its two ternary complex structures reveal two distinct modes for receptor binding, demonstrating a tolerance for altered orientations of highly similar receptors. The mutation experiments further demonstrate the promiscuity of AuraA towards imidazole-C-dimethylallylation. In this work, we also characterize a case of AuraA mutant-catalyzed dimethylallylation of imidazole moiety, offering available structural insights into the utilization and engineering of dimethylallyl tryptophan synthase family prenyltransferases.
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