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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Biochemical Characterization Of The Nifb Enzyme And Nifb-cofactor

Gevorkyan, Jirair 01 January 2013 (has links)
The Mo-nitrogenase complex is composed of two components, Fe-protein and MoFe-protein. This complex is able to catalyze the reduction of N2 through the MgATP dependent transfer of electrons from the Fe-protein Fe4S4 cluster to the MoFe-protein P-cluster and, subsequently, to the iron-molybdenum cofactor (FeMoco). FeMo-co is a Fe7S9MoC-(R)-homocitrate cluster and has two biosynthetic precursors, NifB-co and L-cluster, of unknown structure and composition. The biosynthesis of FeMo-co is an enigmatic process that minimally requires NifB, NifEN, Fe-protein, MoO4 2- , (R)-homocitrate and S-adenolsylmethionine. A means to isolate the NifB enzyme for characterization has been developed through use of a GST-fusion tag. Double recombination of A. vinelandii strains with a constructed vector has yielded strains capable of nif promoter regulated expression of GST-NifB. Extracts of strains containing GST-NifB were shown to activate the Monitrogenase complex in biochemical complementation assays. Mass spectroscopy was then used to verify successful isolation of GST-NifB by GSH-Sepharose affinity purification. The number of NifB-co ligand binding sites and ligand types were examined by EXAFS analysis of samples containing selenol and thiol ligands. A Fe6S9C model for NifB-co was optimized to best fit the EXAFS data, where a 2-fold discrepancy in binding sites implied by thiol or selenol only ligand samples suggests Fe-(μ2S)-Fe binding in the absence of Se. Samples containing heterogeneous ligand types indicated that NifX bound NifB-co ligates to four cysteine residues and one molecule of DTT.

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