The carnitine acyltransferases which catalyse the reversible transfer of fatty acyl groups between carnitine and coenzyme A have been proposed to contain a catalytic histidine. Here, the chemical reactivity of active site groups has been used to demonstrate differences between the active sites of beef liver carnitine octanoyltransferase (COT) and carnitine palmitoyltransferase-II (CPT-II). Treatment of CPT-II with the histidine-selective reagent, diethyl pyrocarbonate (DEPC), resulted in simple linear pseudo-first-order kinetics. The reversal of the inhibition by hydroxylamine and the pKa (7.1) of the modified residue indicated that the residue was a histidine. The order of the inactivation kinetics showed that 1mol of histidine was modified per mol of CPT-II. When COT was treated with DEPC the kinetics of inhibition were biphasic with an initial rapid loss of activity followed by a slower loss of activity. The residue reacting in the faster phase of inhibition was not a histidine but possibly a serine. The modification of this residue did not lead to complete loss of activity suggesting that a direct role in catalysis is unlikely. It was deduced that the residue modified by DEPC in the slower phase was a lysine and indeed fluorodinitrobenzene (FDNB) inactivated COT with linear pseudo-first-order kinetics. The COT peptide containing the FDNB-labelled lysine was isolated and sequenced. Alignment of this sequence placed it 10 amino acids downstream of the putative active-site histidine.
Amino Acid Sequence Animals