Mutational analysis of substrate inhibition in tyrosine hydroxylase

Substrate inhibition in tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) was analyzed by deletion mutagenesis. The deletion mutant TH 156/456 was the smallest section of TH to retain substrate inhibition. The TH 156/456 was monomeric, and so multimer formation does not play a role in substrate inhibition in TH. Further deletion at the N terminus to residue 169 produced a TH molecule with no substrate inhibition but high activity. A mutagenic scan of this region showed that mutations at Trp166 were responsible for this phenotype. A screen of a library of TH molecules containing random mutations identified three other mutants that had lost substrate inhibition but retained high activity. The results in this report are consistent with a model in which substrate inhibition acts through an allosteric mechanism.