NOVEL MECHANISM-BASED SUBSTRATES OF DIHYDROFOLATE-REDUCTASE AND THE THERMODYNAMICS OF LIGAND-BINDING - A COMPARISON OF THEORY AND EXPERIMENT FOR 8-METHYLPTERIN AND 6,8-DIMETHYLPTERIN

Molecular dynamics simulation and free energy perturbation techniques have been used to study the relative binding free energies of the designed mechanism-based pterins, 8-methylpterin and 6,8-dimethylpterin, to dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), with cofactor nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH). The calculated free energy differences suggest that DHFR.NADPH.6,8-dimethylpterin is thermodynamically more stable than DHFR.NADPH.8-methylpterin by 2.4 kcal/mol when the substrates are protonated and by 1.3 kcal/mol when neutral. The greater binding strength of 6,8-dimethylpterin may be attributed largely to hydration effects. In terms of an appropriate model for the pH-dependent kinetic mechanism, these differences can be interpreted consistently with experimental data obtained from previous kinetic studies, i.e., 6,8-dimethylpterin is a more efficient substrate of vertebrate DHFRs than 8-methylpterin. The kinetic data suggest a value of 6.6 +/- 0.2 for the pK(a) of the active site Glu-30 in DHFR.NADPH. We have also used experimental data to estimate absolute values for thermodynamic dissociation constants of the active (i.e., protonated) forms of the substrates: these are of the same order as for the binding of folate (0.1-10 muM). The relative binding free energy calculated from the empirically derived dissociation constants for the protonated forms of 8-methylpterin and 6,8-dimethylpterin is 1.4 kcal/mol, a value which compares reasonably well with the theoretical value of 2.4 kcal/mol.