Abstract:
The last essential enzyme in the biosynthetic pathway of trilobatin, phloretin-4'-
O glycosyltransferase (P4'-OGT), catalyzes the conversion of trilobatin to phloretin
in vitro. However, only a few P4'-OGTs have been found in plants. This study used
Malus domestica phloretin-4'-
O glycosyltransferase (
MdPh-4'-OGT) as a query to identify and clone two UDP-glucuronosyltransferase (
UGT) genes, designated
UGT74L2 and
UGT74L3, from the transcriptome of
Andrographis paniculata. According to a phylogenetic tree analysis,
UGT74L2 and
UGT74L3 belonged to the UGT74 family, which has been linked to several activities in other species. The
in vitro enzymatic reaction demonstrated that UGT74L2 could particularly catalyze the formation of trilobatin from phloretin, but UGT74L3 had no effects. By using Ni-NTA affinity chromatography to extract the soluble UGT74L2 recombinant protein, the enzymatic kinetics of the activity was investigated using phloretin as the substrate. The results showed that the optimal temperature and pH for UGT74L2 enzymatic reaction were 40 ℃ and 8.0 (Tris-HCl system), respectively. Three metal ions (Ca
2+, Mn
2+ and Co
2+) showed inhibitory effect on the activity of UGT74L2, while Mg
2+ could improve the activity of UGT74L2. Other tested metal ions have no significant effect on UGT74L2. The results of enzymatic kinetic parameters that the
Km value was 29.84 μmol·L
-1, the
kcat was 0.02 s
-1, and the
kcat·
Km-1 was 572.6 mol
-1·s
-1. By homology modeling, molecular docking and mutation experiments, we found that multiple amino acids residues around the substrate binding pocket play quite an important role during catalytic process, In summary, we identified a novel
P4'-OGT gene from medicinal plant
Andrographis paniculata and provided a new efficient catalyst to synthesize trilobatin. Meanwhile, this study provides a reference for mining new efficient glycosylation modules from plants.