The chondroitin sulfate moiety of thrombomodulin binds a second molecule of thrombin.

The role of the chondroitin sulfate moiety of thrombomodulin (TM) in the binding of thrombin to TM has been examined using fluorescent derivatives of thrombin. An anilinonaphthalene-6-sulfonic acid (ANS) dye was attached covalently to the active site histidine of thrombin via a D-Phe-Pro-Arg (FPR) linkage to form ANS-FPR-thrombin. When ANS-FPR-thrombin was titrated with TM lacking the chondroitin sulfate moiety (csf-TM), a monotonic and saturable increase in ANS emission intensity was observed that was consistent with the formation of a high affinity 1:1 thrombin-csf-TM complex. In contrast, titration of ANS-FPR-thrombin with intact TM containing the chondroitin sulfate resulted in a biphasic change in ANS-FPR-thrombin emission intensity that was consistent with each molecule of TM binding at least two molecules of ANS-FPR-thrombin with different affinities. This suggested that the second thrombin binds to TM via the chondroitin sulfate moiety. A direct interaction between thrombin and chondroitin sulfate was demonstrated by showing that chondroitin sulfate, cleaved and purified from TM, caused a saturable increase in ANS emission intensity upon addition to an ANS-FPR-thrombin sample. This spectral change was reversed by adding an excess of unmodified thrombin. The minimum Kd for the ANS-FPR-thrombin-chondroitin sulfate complex was approximately 20 nM, consistent with chondroitin sulfate being the lower affinity binding site on TM for thrombin. The titration of chondroitin sulfate into ANS-FPR-thrombin samples in the absence and presence of a TM fragment containing the fifth and sixth growth factor-like domains (GF5-6) showed that GF5-6 did not block chondroitin sulfate binding and that a GF5-6-thrombin-chondroitin sulfate ternary complex was formed. Thus, the chondroitin sulfate binds to thrombin somewhere other than anion-binding exosite I, and in doing so, alters the structure and/or environment of the active site more than 15A from the active site serine without detectably changing the conformation near Ser-195. Since excess TM and excess csf-TM increased the ANS emission intensity of ANS-FPR-thrombin to different extents (approximately 15 and approximately 80%, respectively), the chondroitin sulfate also influences the environment of the active site probe even when thrombin is bound to the higher affinity site on TM (GF5-6).