Oxygen exchange in the gamma-phosphoryl group of protein-bound ATP during Mg2+-dependent adenosine triphosphatase activity of myosin.

When ATP binds to myosin in the presence of Mg2+ there follows a rapid cleavage reaction to yield a myosin-product complex whose breakdown is rate-limiting in the overall adenosine triphosphatase reaction at 21 degrees and pH 8.0. Recent kinetic studies on this system have led to the proposal that the cleavage of ATP bound to myosin is reversible. This conclusion is based in part on the observation that when ATP is mixed with an excess of myosin active sites a small amount of tightly bound ATP exists whose life-time coincides with that of the myosin-product complex and implies these two species are in equilibrium during their decay. Previous oxygen exchange studies have shown that phosphate released as free product contains more than one oxygen atom from water. A rapid equilibration between myosin-bound ATP and a myosin-products complex can account for the extra water oxygen incorporation of the product phosphate. Such a model requires that the gamma-phosphoryl group of the bound ATP also exchanges its oxygen atoms with water. Results presented in this paper show that protein-bound ATP labeled in the three terminal oxygen atoms of the gamma-phosphoryl group with 18O exchanges about 75% of its label within 2 s of binding to the active site of myosin. This result provides chemical evidence for a model in which bound ATP undergoes a reversible reaction with water. Incomplete exchange may arise from kinetic and/or structural restraints on the mechanism and plausible models are discussed.