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Radicals: Your life is in their hands
Author(s) -
Stubbe JoAnne
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.27.1_supplement.337.3
Subject(s) - radical , chemistry , ribonucleotide reductase , surprise , protein subunit , reactivity (psychology) , cysteine , biochemistry , enzyme , medicine , psychology , social psychology , alternative medicine , pathology , gene
It will come as a surprise to many scientists, that Nature uses free radical chemistry in essential metabolic pathways. She has figured out how to harness the considerable reactivity of these species to carry out very difficult chemical transformations with exquisite specificity. I will discuss the role of “good” radicals in biology using ribonucleotide reductases (RNRs) as a paradigm, a problem that my lab has investigated for 30 years. Specifically the use of unnatural tyrosine analogs to study oxidation of a cysteine to a thiyl radical in the active site of the enzyme in one subunit, by a tyrosyl radical (tyrosyl radical analog) in the second subunit over a distance of 35 angstroms will be discussed. Time resolved biophysical methods to elucidate the mechanism of this unprecedented reaction will be described.