Temperature-Dependent Kinetic Isotope Effects in R67 Dihydrofolate Reductase from Path-Integral Simulations

Calculation of temperature-dependent kinetic isotope effects (KIE) in enzymes presents a significant theoretical challenge. Additionally, it is not trivial to identify enzymes with available experimental accurate intrinsic KIEs in a range of temperatures. In the current work, we present a theoretical study of KIEs in the primitive R67 dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) enzyme and compare with experimental work. The advantage of R67 DHFR is its significantly lower kinetic complexity compared to more evolved DHFR isoforms. We employ mass-perturbation-based path-integral simulations in conjunction with umbrella sampling and a hybrid quantum mechanics-molecular mechanics Hamiltonian. We obtain temperature-dependent KIEs in good agreement with experiments and ascribe the temperature-dependent KIEs primarily to zero-point energy effects. The active site in the primitive enzyme is found to be poorly preorganized, which allows excessive water access to the active site and results in loosely bound reacting ligands.