Suicide substrates: mechanism-based inactivators of specific target enzymes.

Abstract

It is a great pleasure to present this paper at a symposium celebrating the 80th birthday of Professor Fritz Lipmann both because of my personal association with him (admittedly stretching back only a mere 15 years) and because he is such a seminal figure in the development of biochemistry and enzymology. I joined the Lipmann laboratory in 1965 as a graduate student to do my doctoral research with Len Spector and initiated mechanistic studies on how citrate was cleaved to acetyl CoA and oxalacetate by the cytoplasmic citrate cleavage enzyme (ATP citrate lyase), discovered by Lipmann and Srere some years earlier in 1953 (Srere and Lipmann 1953). Although (or perhaps because) most other people in the Lipmann laboratory were working on protein biosynthesis, Dr. Lipmann always evinced a lively interest in my experiments and other enzymatic mechanistic studies. Perhaps as a result, I had the pleasure of reading through the autobiographical manuscript of his which became his book Wanderings of a Biochemist (Lipmann 1971). That experience increased my appreciation for the breadth of contributions to biochemistry made by the central figure of this meeting.KeywordsPartition RatioThymidylate SynthetaseAmino Acid DecarboxylaseAlanine RacemaseGaba TransaminaseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.