A comparative CD study of carbonic anhydrase isoenzymes with different number of tryptophans: impact on calculation of secondary structure content.

The CD spectra of human carbonic anhydrase I and II and bovine carbonic anhydrase III were recorded and analyzed. The 3D structures of these isoenzymes are known, showing very similar secondary structure and polypeptide-chain fold. The tryptophan content, however, differs between the isoenzymes, i.e., isoenzymes I, II, and III possess 6, 7, and 8 tryptophans, respectively. All of the tryptophans except the additional tryptophans in isoenzymes II and III, i.e., W245 and W47, are conserved. Despite the fact that X-ray structure determinations showed that the isoenzymes had highly similar secondary structure, the contents of alpha-helix and beta-sheet structure differed considerably when using different CD algorithms for estimation of the fractions of various secondary structural elements. This shows that aromatic amino acids also interfere in the wavelength region (far-UV) used to calculate the amount of secondary structure. Such interference is especially problematic when analyzing proteins like carbonic anhydrase, which consist mainly of beta-structure that gives rise to weak ellipticity bands, compared to the bands arising from alpha-helical structure.