Cooperative effects of CTP on calf liver CTP synthetase

In all previous kinetics studies of calf liver CTP synthetase, simple Michaelis-Menten hyperbolic plots were obtained. In this study it was shown that calf liver CTP synthetase could generate sigmoidal kinetic plots as a function of the substrate UTP when in the presence of the product of the reaction, CTP. The Hill number was estimated to be 2.8. The enzyme did not generate sigmoidal plots as a function of the other substrates (L-glutamine and ATP) either in the presence or absence of CTP. Thus, CTP apparently induced changes in the liver enzyme which altered the binding of UTP to the enzyme by acting at a site distinct from the UTP binding site (allosteric site). This concept was further strengthened by the fact that 3-deazaUTP, a known competitive inhibitor of the liver enzyme, did not induce sigmoidal kinetic plots. It was also shown that CTP had no effect upon the dimerization of the enzyme, thus ruling out monomer to dimer transitions as a potential mechanism for the observed sigmoidal kinetics.