J. Biol. Chem., Vol. 266, Issue 2, 685-688, 01, 1991
Hirudin: amino-terminal residues play a major role in the interaction with thrombin
JB Lazar, RC Winant and PH Johnson
Molecular Biology Department, SRI International, Menlo Park, California 94025.
Amino acid substitutions within the amino-terminal 5 residues of the
thrombin-specific inhibitor hirudin dramatically alter its ability to
inhibit the thrombin-catalyzed hydrolysis of both a chromogenic substrate
and fibrinogen. Replacing the highly conserved Tyr-3 residue with Trp or
Phe increases hirudin's affinity for thrombin 3-6-fold (decreases the
inhibition constant, Ki) whereas Thr results in a 450- fold increase in Ki.
A more extensive modification involving deletion of the amino-terminal Val,
and Tyr-3----Val, Thr-4----Gln, and Asp-5---- Ile replacement, results in a
large reduction in thrombin inhibitory activity corresponding to greater
than a 10(7)-fold increase in Ki and a 10(3)-fold increase in IC50, using
D-Phe-L-pipecolyl-Arg-p- nitroanilide (S-2238) and fibrinogen,
respectively, as substrates. Kinetic analysis of these mutant proteins and
synthetic peptide fragments and available structural information on
thrombin and hirudin derived from protein crystallography and
two-dimensional NMR studies indicate that the amino-terminal region of
hirudin binds at the apolar binding/active site region of thrombin, with
Tyr-3 occupying the S3 specificity site. The large effect of these
modifications on hirudin activity suggests that alteration of the
amino-terminal segment can destabilize the interaction of other regions of
hirudin with thrombin.