Direct Cysteine Desulfurase Activity Determination by NMR and the Study of the Functional Role of Key Structural Elements of Human NFS1

ACS Chem Biol. 2023 Jul 21;18(7):1534-1547. doi: 10.1021/acschembio.3c00147. Epub 2023 Jul 6.

Abstract

The mitochondrial cysteine desulfurase NFS1 is an essential PLP-dependent enzyme involved in iron-sulfur cluster assembly. The enzyme catalyzes the desulfurization of the l-Cys substrate, producing a persulfide and l-Ala as products. In this study, we set the measurement of the product l-Ala by NMR in vitro by means of 1H NMR spectra acquisition. This methodology provided us with the possibility of monitoring the reaction in both fixed-time and real-time experiments, with high sensitivity and accuracy. By studying I452A, W454A, Q456A, and H457A NFS1 variants, we found that the C-terminal stretch (CTS) of the enzyme is critical for function. Specifically, mutation of the extremely conserved position W454 resulted in highly decreased activity. Additionally, we worked on two singular variants: "GGG" and C158A. In the former, the catalytic Cys-loop was altered by including two Gly residues to increase the flexibility of this loop. This variant had significantly impaired activity, indicating that the Cys-loop motions are fine-tuned in the wild-type enzyme. In turn, for C158A, we found an unanticipated increase in l-Cys desulfurase activity. Furthermore, we carried out molecular dynamics simulations of the supercomplex dedicated to iron-sulfur cluster biosynthesis, which includes NFS1, ACP, ISD11, ISCU2, and FXN subunits. We identified CTS as a key element that established interactions with ISCU2 and FXN concurrently; we found specific interactions that are established when FXN is present, reinforcing the idea that FXN not only forms part of the iron-sulfur cluster assembly site but also modulates the internal motions of ISCU2.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Carbon-Sulfur Lyases / metabolism
  • Humans
  • Iron / chemistry
  • Iron-Binding Proteins / chemistry
  • Iron-Binding Proteins / genetics
  • Iron-Sulfur Proteins* / chemistry
  • Sulfur / chemistry

Substances

  • cysteine desulfurase
  • Iron-Sulfur Proteins
  • Carbon-Sulfur Lyases
  • Sulfur
  • Iron
  • Iron-Binding Proteins
  • NFS1 protein, human