Volume 272, Number 2,
Issue of January 10, 1997
pp. 1019-1025
©1997 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.
TAO1, a Representative of the Molybdenum Cofactor Containing
Hydroxylases from Tomato
(Received for publication, August 2, 1996, and in revised form, October 23, 1996)
Naomi
Ori
,
Yuval
Eshed
§
,
Patricia
Pinto
,
Ilan
Paran
§
,
Dani
Zamir
and
Robert
Fluhr
From the
Department of Plant Genetics, Weizmann
Institute of Science, P. O. Box 26, Rehovot, Israel and the
§ Department of Field and Vegetable Crops, The Faculty of
Agriculture and The Otto Warburg Center for Biotechnology, The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Rehovot 76100, Israel
Aldehyde oxidase and xanthine dehydrogenase are a
group of ubiquitous hydroxylases, containing a molybdenum cofactor
(MoCo) and two iron-sulfur groups. Plant aldehyde oxidase and xanthine dehydrogenase activities are involved in nitrogen metabolism and hormone biosynthesis, and their corresponding genes have not yet been
isolated. Here we describe a new gene from tomato, which shows the
characteristics of a MoCo containing hydroxylase. It shares sequence
homology with xanthine dehydrogenases and aldehyde oxidases from
various organisms, and similarly contains binding sites for two
iron-sulfur centers and a molybdenum-binding region. However, it does
not contain the xanthine dehydrogenase conserved sequences thought to
be involved in NAD binding and in substrate specificity, and is likely
to encode an aldehyde oxidase-type activity. This gene was designated
tomato aldehyde oxidase 1 (TAO1). TAO1 belongs
to a multigene family, whose members are shown to map to clusters on
chromosomes 1 and 11. MoCo hydroxylase activity is shown to be
recognized by antibodies raised against recombinant TAO1 polypeptides.
Immunoblots reveal that TAO1 cross-reacting material is ubiquitously
expressed in various organisms, and in plants it is mostly abundant in
fruits and rapidly dividing tissues.