| Popis: |
Lipoxygenases are non-heme, iron-containing enzymes that use molecular oxygen for the dioxygenation of polyunsaturated fatty acids to yield hydroperoxides-the first step in the mammalian biosynthetic pathways leading to leukotrienes and lipoxins from arachidonic acid (1). Because of the importance of these compounds, lipoxygenases have been the subject of extensive studies: detailed kinetic measurements, spectroscopy, cloning, expression and site-directed mutagenesis. Despite these efforts, there has been no atomic resolution model available and the answers to many of the fundamental structural and mechanistic questions about these enzymes have remained elusive. We now discuss the three-dimensional structure of soybean lipoxygenase-1, an enzyme homologous to the mammalian lipoxygenases, that we reported elsewhere (2). |
