Nitric oxide and NAD-dependent protein modification.

Nitric oxide (NO) has been suggested to act as a regulator of endogenous intracellular ADP-ribosylation, based on radiolabelling of proteins in tissue homogenates incubated with [32P]NAD and NO. After the NO-stimulated modification was replicated in a defined system containing only the purified acceptor protein, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), the hypothesis of NO-stimulation of an endogenous ADP-ribosyltransferase became moot. The NO-stimulated, NAD-dependent modification of GAPDH was recently characterized as covalent binding of the whole NAD molecule to the enzyme, not ADP-ribosylation. With this result, along with the knowledge that GAPDH is stoichiometrically S-nitrosylated, the role of NO in protein modification with NAD may be viewed as the conferring of an unexpected chemical reactivity upon GAPDH, possibly due to nitrosylation of a cysteine in the enzyme active site.