Hypercooperativity induced by interface mutations in the phosphofructokinase from Escherichia coli.

The saturation of the allosteric phosphofructokinase from Escherichia coli by its substrate fructose-6-phosphate is highly cooperative and seems to occur in an "all-or-none" process at all active sites. This cooperativity measured by the Hill coefficient can still be markedly increased by mutation of a single residue located at a subunit interface, Arg152. X-ray crystallography shows that Arg152 forms an ion-pair with Glu148 within an alpha-helix of one subunit. This ion-pair is close to a symmetry axis and interacts with the ion-pair Glu148-Arg152 of the neighbouring chain across the subunit interface. Mutations of Glu148 affect cooperativity much less than those of Arg152. The substitution of Arg152 by lysine increases the Hill coefficient by two-fold to a value larger than the number of substrate binding sites, which exceeds the maximum cooperativity predicted by the two "classical" models, concerted or sequential, of allosteric regulation. This indicates that the steady-state overall hypercooperativity is (at least partly) of kinetic origin. The hypercooperative mutants of Arg152 also show an enhanced cooperativity in their allosteric inhibition by phospho-enol-pyruvate. These results suggest that the allosteric coupling between distant sites involves (1) electrostatic interactions across the subunit interface between residues Glu148 and Arg152 from two adjacent chains, and (2) a relative movement of the alpha-helices containing Glu148 and Arg152 that could propagate and amplify a conformational change between the interface and the active site within each subunit.