Binding of 5-phospho-D-arabinonohydroxamate and 5-phospho-D-arabinonate inhibitors to zinc phosphomannose isomerase from Candida albicans studied by polarizable molecular mechanics and quantum mechanics.

Type I phosphomannose isomerase (PMI) is a Zn-dependent metalloenzyme involved in the isomerization of D-fructose 6-phosphate to D-mannose 6-phosphate. One of our laboratories has recently designed and synthesized 5-phospho-D-arabinonohydroxamate (5PAH), an inhibitor endowed with a nanomolar affinity for PMI (Roux et al., Biochemistry 2004, 43, 2926). By contrast, the 5-phospho-D-arabinonate (5PAA), in which the hydroxamate moiety is replaced by a carboxylate one, is devoid of inhibitory potency. Subsequent biochemical studies showed that in its PMI complex, 5PAH binds Zn(II) through its hydroxamate moiety rather than through its phosphate. These results have stimulated the present theoretical investigation in which we resort to the SIBFA polarizable molecular mechanics procedure to unravel the structural and energetical aspects of 5PAH and 5PAA binding to a 164-residue model of PMI. Consistent with the experimental results, our theoretical studies indicate that the complexation of PMI by 5PAH is much more favorable than by 5PAA, and that in the 5PAH complex, Zn(II) ligation by hydroxamate is much more favorable than by phosphate. Validations by parallel quantum-chemical computations on model of the recognition site extracted from the PMI-inhibitor complexes, and totaling up to 140 atoms, showed the values of the SIBFA intermolecular interaction energies in such models to be able to reproduce the quantum-chemistry ones with relative errors < 3%. On the basis of the PMI-5PAH SIBFA energy-minimized structure, we report the first hypothesis of a detailed view of the active site of the zinc PMI complexed to the high-energy intermediate analogue inhibitor, which allows us to identify active site residues likely involved in the proton transfer between the two adjacent carbons of the substrates.