Probing the Donor and Acceptor Substrate Specificity of the Gamma-Glutamyl Transpeptidase

γ-Glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT) is a two-substrate enzyme that plays a central role in glutathione metabolism and is a potential target for drug design. GGT catalyzes the cleavage of γ-glutamyl donor substrates and the transfer of the γ-glutamyl moiety to an amine of an acceptor substrate or water. Although structures of bacterial GGT have revealed details of the protein–ligand interactions at the donor site, the acceptor substrate site is relatively undefined. The recent identification of a species-specific acceptor site inhibitor, OU749, suggests that these inhibitors may be less toxic than glutamine analogues. Here we investigated the donor and acceptor substrate preferences of Bacillus anthracis GGT (CapD) and applied computational approaches in combination with kinetics to probe the structural basis of the enzyme’s substrate and inhibitor binding specificities and compare them with human GGT. Site-directed mutagenesis studies showed that the R432A and R520S variants exhibited 6- and 95-fold decreases...