Interrogating the activities of conformational deformed enzyme by single-molecule fluorescence-magnetic tweezers microscopy

Characterizing the impact of fluctuating enzyme conformation on enzymatic activity is critical in understanding the structure-function relationship and enzymatic reaction dynamics. Different from studying enzyme conformations under a denaturing condition, it is highly informative to manipulate the conformation of an enzyme under an enzymatic reaction condition while monitoring the real-time enzymatic activity changes simultaneously. By perturbing conformation of horseradish peroxidase (HRP) molecules using our home-developed single-molecule total internal reflection magnetic tweezers, we successfully manipulated the enzymatic conformation and probed the enzymatic activity changes of HRP in a catalyzed H2O2-amplex red reaction. We also observed a significant tolerance of the enzyme activity to the enzyme conformational perturbation. Our results provide a further understanding of the relation between enzyme behavior and enzymatic conformational fluctuation, enzyme-substrate interactions, enzyme-substrate active complex formation, and protein folding-binding interactions.