IN VITRO CARBOXYLATION OF EXOGENOUS PROTEIN SUBSTRATES BY VITAMIN K-DEPENDENT CARBOXYLASE
Authors: Vermeer C , Soute BA M , Ulrich MM W 
Published: August 2018

In vivo treatment of experimental animals with vitamin K-antagonists induces the accumulation of non-carboxylated coagulation factor precursors in the liver, where they are tightly bound to vitamin K-dependent carboxylase. If hepatic carboxylase is isolated from warfarin-treated animals, it is obtained therefore almost exclusively in the form of an enzyme/substrate complex. If carboxylase is prepared from non-treated animals, on the other hand, the resulting enzyme is predominantly substrate-free. Small substrates like F L E E L or decarboxylated osteocalcinare carboxylated equally well by both types of carboxylase, but protein substrates(Mr > 30 000) are recognized exclusively by substrate-free carboxylase.

Initial attempts to purify carboxylasewere performed with livers from warfarin-treated cows as a starting material. Antibodies against the normal blood coagulation factors crossreact with the hepatic precursor proteins so that the enzyme/substrate complexes could be specifically extracted from detergent-solubilized microsomes by the substrate/antibody interaction. This procedure resulted ina substantial purification of carboxylase, but because its endogenous substrate remained firmly bound, even after it had been carboxylated in vitro, the enzyme system was not suitable for the carboxylation of protein substrates.Therefore a second strategy was developed by which substrate-free carboxylase (from normal livers) was partly purified by sequential extraction of the microsomal membranes with detergents, followed by ammonium sulfate precipitation and size exclusion chromatography.This procedure resulted in a soluble carboxylase complex, still consisting of 7 proteins and phosphatidylcholine. Although further dissociation of the complex resulted in a complete loss of activity, it is not sure if all components play a role in the carboxylation reaction. Exogenous substrates which could be carboxylated by substrate-free carboxylase were: the penta-peptide F L E E L, descarboxyprothrombin from bovine plasma, thermally decarboxylated osteocalcin from bovine bone and non-car-boxy lated coagulaton factor precursors which had been produced by recombinant-DNA techniques in various laboratories. The . efficiency of CO^ incorporation was: 1 mole per 100 moles of F L E E L, 1 mole per 240 moles of descarboxy-prothrombin, 1 mole per mole of decarboxylated osteocalcin and 8 moles per mole of a recombinant factor IX precursor. We assume that the high efficiency with which the recombinant coagulation factor precursors were carboxylated is due to the presence of at least part of their leader sequence. The importance of the aminoacid chain preceding the first carboxylatable Glu residue is demonstrated by the fact that descarboxylated osteocalcin of bovine origin is carboxylated with a relatively high efficiency, whereas descarboxylated osteocalcin from monkey bone is not recognized atal.. Yet the only difference between the two substrates is found in their aminoacids 3 and 4, whereas the first carboxylatable Glu occurs at position 17. It seems, therefore, that the aminoacids 1-16 in bovine osteocalcin mimic to some extent part of the leader sequence in the coagulation factor precursors. Chemical or biochemical modification of decarboxylated osteocalcin might reveal which structural features contribute to its recognition by hepatic carboxylase.

The optimal conditions for carboxylation include a high concentration of dithiols (e.g. DTT) and under these conditions disulfide bridges are reduced. Obviously this will lead to a complete destruction of the biological activity of various carboxylated products. Therefore we have searched for a more natural reducing system and it was found that the bacterial thioredoxin/thiore-doxin-reductase system in the presence of 40 uM NADFH was able to replace DTT in the reaction mixtures. Since a comparable system also occurs in calf liver it seems not unlikely that this is the physiological counterpart of the dithiols used in vitro.