Anchimeric assistance in the intramolecular reaction of glucose-dehydrogenase-polyethylene glycol NAD conjugate.

Polyethylene glycol-bound derivatives of NAD(P) (PEG-NAD(P)) are water-soluble macromolecular coenzymes used in continuous enzyme reactors. These NAD(P) derivatives have good coenzyme activity for many dehydrogenases, but some enzymes such as glucose dehydrogenase (EC 1.1.1.47) show very low activity with these derivatives (less than 0.1% of that for native NAD(P)). In this work, we prepared a covalently linked glucose-dehydrogenase-polyethylene glycol-NAD conjugate (GlcDH-PEG-NAD) and found that the conjugate shows a much higher reaction rate than that of the native enzyme plus PEG-NAD: the ratio of the reaction rates of GlcDH-PEG-NAD and the native enzyme plus PEG-NAD is calculated to be 10,000-fold at the concentrations of the enzyme subunit and NAD moiety of 0.31 and 0.65 microM, respectively; the rate of the conjugate is even higher than that of the native enzyme plus native NAD. This rate acceleration is due to the increase in the effective concentration of NAD moiety ("anchimeric assistance") and demonstrates the potential of covalent linking for improving the interaction between an enzyme and a coenzyme derivative.