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Journal of Bacteriology, January 2004, p. 351-355, Vol. 186, No. 2
0021-9193/04/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JB.186.2.351-355.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Dihydropteridine Reductase as an Alternative to Dihydrofolate Reductase for Synthesis of Tetrahydrofolate in Thermus thermophilus
Valérie Wilquet,1,
Mark Van de Casteele,2,
Daniel Gigot,1 Christianne Legrain,3 and Nicolas Glansdorff2,3*
Microbiology, Université Libre de Bruxelles,1
Microbiology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel,2
J. M. Wiame Institute for Microbiological Research, B-1070 Brussels, Belgium3
Received 9 June 2003/
Accepted 10 October 2003

ABSTRACT
A strategy devised to isolate a gene coding for a dihydrofolate
reductase from
Thermus thermophilus DNA delivered only clones
harboring instead a gene (the
T. thermophilus dehydrogenase
[DH
Tt] gene) coding for a dihydropteridine reductase which displays
considerable dihydrofolate reductase activity (about 20% of
the activity detected with 6,7-dimethyl-7,8-dihydropterine in
the quinonoid form as a substrate). DH
Tt appears to account
for the synthesis of tetrahydrofolate in this bacterium, since
a classical dihydrofolate reductase gene could not be found
in the recently determined genome nucleotide sequence (A. Henne,
personal communication). The derived amino acid sequence displays
most of the highly conserved cofactor and active-site residues
present in enzymes of the short-chain dehydrogenase/reductase
family. The enzyme has no pteridine-independent oxidoreductase
activity, in contrast to
Escherichia coli dihydropteridine reductase,
and thus appears more similar to mammalian dihydropteridine
reductases, which do not contain a flavin prosthetic group.
We suggest that bifunctional dihydropteridine reductases may
be responsible for the synthesis of tetrahydrofolate in other
bacteria, as well as archaea, that have been reported to lack
a classical dihydrofolate reductase but for which possible substitutes
have not yet been identified.

INTRODUCTION
Dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR; EC 15.1.3) catalyzes the synthesis
of tetrahydrofolate (FH
4), a key metabolite involved in the
synthesis of several amino acids, purines, and deoxythymidylate.
The substrate of DHFR, dihydrofolate (FH
2), is a product of
thymidylate synthase (TS;
thyA gene), which uses
N5,
N10-methylene-FH
4 as a substrate.
Escherichia coli DHFR-null mutants (with a mutation
in
dyrA or
folA) appear to be nonviable, even on rich medium,
unless they are also TS deficient (
1,
6); this finding suggests
that TS activity is toxic in a
dyrA background because it exhausts
residual FH
4 production due to another enzyme proceeding at
a slower pace than DHFR (
4). This substitute enzyme could be
a dihydropteridine reductase (DHPR; EC 1.6.99.7), since
E. coli contains a DHPR able to catalyze the same reaction as DHFR at
a comparatively low rate (
16,
17). The metabolic role of prokaryotic
DHPR is not known; it is possible that nonenzymatic oxidation
of FH
4 produces a quinonoid FH
2 species which is regenerated
to FH
4 by DHPR but not by DHFR (
14). In the few proteobacteria
(but not
E. coli) in which aromatic amino acid hydroxylases
have been reported to occur, a DHPR regenerates the reduced
cofactor tetrahydropterin, which is oxidized during the hydroxylase
reaction (
21). The metabolic role of these hydroxylases, however,
is not clear.
Trimethoprim (TMP) is a powerful inhibitor of prokaryotic DHFRs, but when such a DHFR is overexpressed from a plasmid, it may confer TMP resistance on an E. coli host (5, 13, 19, 20). We have used this approach in order to isolate a dyrA gene from Thermus thermophilus. As described below, the gene selected in this way proved, however, to code for a dehydrogenase (T. thermophilus dehydrogenase [DHTt]) of the short-chain dehydrogenase/reductase (SDR) family (12) with both DHPR and DHFR activities. No T. thermophilus dyrA homologue could be isolated by this approach; also, there appears to be no DHFR gene in the Thermus genome (A. Henne, personal communication).

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Culture conditions.
E. coli strains were grown at 37°C in rich liquid medium
853 (
19) or in solid medium with added 1.5% agar (Difco). Kanamycin
(KAN) at 50 µg ml
-1 or KAN plus 10 mM TMP was added to
the medium for bacteria harboring recombinant plasmids.
T. thermophilus HB27 was grown at 72°C in a medium containing (per liter)
9 g of tryptic soy broth (Difco), 4 g of yeast extract (Difco),
and 3 g of NaCl; the pH of this medium was adjusted to 7.5 (
11).
Cloning the DHTt gene.
Restriction enzymes and T4 ligase were purchased from Boehringer Mannheim. T. thermophilus HB27 genomic DNA partially digested with the enzyme Sau3A was used to construct a genomic
ZAP DNA library in the pBK-CMV vector (Stratagene) according to the manufacturer's instructions. This library was used for the transformation of E. coli strain XL1-Blue MRF (Stratagene) as described in Results.
Enzyme assays.
DHFR activity was assayed as described in reference 19 except that the buffer was 50 mM potassium phosphate (pH 6.5) and the temperature was as indicated in the text. The DHPR assay was run with 50 mM potassium phosphate buffer at pH 7.0 and at 35°C with a 0.1 mM concentration of the cofactor (NADPH or NADH), 0.1 mM pteridine, and 6,7-dimethyl-7,8-dihydropterine in the quinonoid form (qPtH2), which was obtained from the 5,6,7,8-tetrahydro form and an equimolar amount of 2,6-dichloroindophenol. One unit of reductase activity was defined as the amount of activity required to convert 1 nmol of NADPH per min.
SDS-PAGE.
Sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) was performed by using a Pharmacia PhastSystem with a discontinuous buffer system and a continuous 8 to 25% gradient gel. Gels were stained with Coomassie brilliant blue. Protein standards (0.5 µg each on the gel; Pharmacia) used for the estimation of subunit molecular masses were phosphorylase b (94 kDa), albumin (67 kDa), ovalbumin (43 kDa), carbonic anhydrase (30 kDa), trypsin inhibitor (20.1 kDa), and
-lactalbumin (14.4 kDa).
Native gel electrophoresis for enzyme activity staining.
The Bio-Rad Prep-Cell system was used at a basic pH. The running buffer was Tris-HCl at pH 10.0. The gel (about 5 ml) was composed of 1 volume of solution A (running buffer supplemented with 0.46 ml of N,N,N',N'-tetramethylethylenediamine/100 ml), 2 volumes of solution B (10% acrylamide, 2.5% N,N-methylene bisacrylamide), and 4 volumes of solution C (0.14% ammonium persulfate). The loading buffer contained 25 mM Tris, 100 mM glycine, 0.1% bromophenol blue, and 10% saccharose. About 5 µg of protein was loaded on the gel and run for 1 h at 150 V.

RESULTS
Isolation of the DHTt gene and analysis of the nucleotide sequence.
The

ZAP
T. thermophilus genomic library was plated for titration
on rich medium containing KAN and for selection on plates containing
KAN and TMP. For ca. 4,000 colonies screened (with a mean insert
size of 2.8 kb and thus a fragment sampling covering six times
the
T. thermophilus genome), there were 20 colonies on the KAN-TMP
plates (with insert sizes ranging from 1.5 to 4.0 kb). Crude
extracts from overnight cultures of these recombinant strains
were cleared by centrifugation, treated for 20 min at 70°C
to inactivate resident
E. coli DHFR activity, and assayed for
DHFR activity at 50°C as described previously (
19). All
of these extracts displayed similar thermoresistant DHFR activities
(on average, 2.5 U/mg of protein), whereas neither the extract
from the control
E. coli dyrA+ strain nor that from
E. coli transformed with a plasmid carrying an unrelated gene (pTAD1GDH
[
3]) displayed measurable activity.
The smallest DNA insert that could be recovered from the cognate phagemids (pDAT1-20) by EcoRI/PstI digestion and that proved to be able to confer resistance to TMP was 1.7 kb long. It contained only one 702-bp open reading frame (ORF) encoding a putative polypeptide of 234 amino acids, named DHTt. This ORF was found by PCR amplification to be present in all recombinant pDATs. The GC content was high (69%), as expected for a Thermus gene. Surprisingly, the DHTt sequence showed no similarity to that of any DHFR but instead with sequences from representatives of the SDR family (Fig. 1). The sequence contains residues that are highly conserved throughout the SDR family, such as the NAD+/NADP+ cofactor-binding motif (GXXXGXG, positions 8 to 14), the NNAG motif (NNVG in DHTt, positions 85 to 88), and the YXXXK motif (residues 153 to 157), claimed to be crucial for substrate binding and catalysis by SDR family proteins (Fig. 1) (7, 8).
Overexpression and characterization of the DHTt gene product.
The DH
Tt-encoding gene was subcloned from pDAT5 into pET24a,
an IPTG (isopropyl-ß-
D-thiogalactopyranoside)-inducible
expression vector, yielding plasmid pTTDH. The ORF was amplified
by PCR by using oligonucleotides designed to bring the ATG start
codon in frame with the vector
NdeI cloning site. The highest
DHFR specific activity was obtained from cells grown at 37°C
up to a density of 4
x 10
8 cells/ml and then induced by 1 mM
IPTG and further incubated at 22°C for 4 h. The specific
activity after 15 min of incubation of the extract at 50°C
was 14.9 U/mg of protein at 35°C in
E. coli pTTDH, compared
to 2.9 U/mg of protein in pDAT5. This activity proved insensitive
to 600 µM methotrexate and 10 µM TMP, concentrations
which are fully inhibitory for
E. coli DHFR (
5).
Attempts at purifying the protein were hampered by low solubility, probably due to the high content of hydrophobic residues (50% L+V+I+M+F+A+P+W). E. coli pTTDH extracts kept for a few hours at 4°C formed a white precipitate that contained the activity and could be partly solubilized at pH 10; further dilution of such preparations under assay conditions fully solubilized them. SDS-PAGE of the cold precipitate gave a major band (Fig. 2) with a molecular mass of about 23 ± 3 kDa, consistent with the 25.4-kDa value calculated from the sequence. Moreover, Edman degradation showed this band to consist of only one protein with an N-terminal amino acid sequence exactly like that deduced from the gene: MRTALVTGSAK. Fast protein liquid chromatography (data not shown) gave a broad estimate of 50 to 90 kDa for the native protein; the high pI (>8.9) of this protein prevents quantitative electrophoresis by standard methods. The native enzyme is probably a dimer (like rat DHPR and several other members of the SDR family [15]), but the possibility of the occurrence of tetramers cannot be excluded.
Enzymatic specificity of the DHTt protein.
The enzyme (cold precipitate) exhibited no detectable activity
with either 6-biopterin (the best substrate for
Leishmania PTR1
[
10]) or
DL-6-methyl-7,8-dihydropterine (a substrate for
E. coli DHPR [
16]) under all conditions tested (pHs 5.5 to 8.5
with different buffers in the presence of salts) (Table
1).
Activity could be detected only with qPtH
2. The enzyme was active
with NADPH. With NADH, the background oxidation was too elevated
for the detection of activity (but see the discussion of the
next experiment). In contrast to
E. coli DHPR, which is a flavoprotein
(
16) and exhibits pteridine-independent oxidoreductase activity
with potassium ferricyanide, the
Thermus enzyme did not exhibit
such activity (Table
1); it thus appears similar to mammalian
DHPRs, which do not contain a flavin prosthetic group. When
assayed under the same conditions, the activities of FH
2 (DHFR)
and qPtH
2 (DHPR) in the presence of NADPH are present at an

1:5 ratio (Table
1).
Activity staining on native gel electrophoresis gels.
The activity staining method used 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazolyl-2)-2,5-diphenyl
tetrazolium bromide (MTT), which is reduced by the product of
the enzymatic reaction to a formazan with a maximum

of 560
nm. To allow the migration of the solubilized protein, basic
gels were prepared (see Materials and Methods).
Thermotoga maritima DHFR was used as a control, since it also has a high pI, has
a rather similar
Mr, and possesses DHFR activity but no DHPR
activity. One gel was loaded with DH
Tt in lane 1 and with
T. maritima DHFR in lanes 2 to 8; the second gel was loaded inversely.
After the electrophoresis of both gels in parallel, gel pieces
corresponding to the different lanes were cut (Fig.
3). For
each gel, pieces 1 and 2 were stained with Coomassie blue and
pieces 3 to 8 were incubated at 37°C in a solution containing
50 mM phosphate buffer (pH 7.0), 0.5 mM NADH or NADPH, and 5
mg of MTT/ml. In addition, incubation solutions for lanes 5
and 6 contained 0.5 mM FH
2, but lanes 7 and 8 contained 0.5
mM qPtH
2 (formed from 0.5 mM PtH
4 and 0.5 mM 2,6-dichloroindophenol).
After 30 min of incubation, an intensely stained band appeared
for
T. maritima DHFR (Fig.
3A) incubated with FH
2 and NADPH
(lane 6). Two hours later, a faint
T. maritima DHFR band appeared
on the gel pieces incubated with FH
2 and NADH (lane 5). At that
time, bands were also detectable on the gel pieces containing
DH
Tt and incubated either with FH
2 and NADH or NADPH (Fig.
3B,
lanes 5 and 6) or with qPtH
2 and NADH or NADPH (Fig.
3B, lanes
7 and 8). DH
Tt exhibited DHFR and DHPR activities with both
NADH and NADPH, but no preference for one of the cofactors was
detectable under these conditions.

DISCUSSION
The main points of this study can be summarized as follows.
The
T. thermophilus genome harbors a gene coding for a reductase
(DH
Tt) which displays both DHPR and DHFR activities with NADH
and NADPH as cofactors and possesses specific features of members
of the SDR protein family. The DHFR activity of this reductase
is considerable, i.e., about 20% of the DHPR activity detected
with qPtH
2 as the substrate. DH
Tt has no pteridine-independent
oxidoreductase activity and is insensitive to concentrations
of methotrexate and TMP that fully inhibit
E. coli DHFR. Moreover,
none of the clones that we could isolate from an apparently
representative
Thermus library expressed a true DHFR, and most
significantly, no corresponding
dyrA gene appears to exist in
the
T. thermophilus genome; indeed, BLAST probing of the complete
genome (A. Henne, personal communication) did not reveal any
sequence homologous to the corresponding genes from
T. maritima and
Deinococcus radiodurans (which is the closest known relative
of
Thermus [
18]). It seems that the essential role of DHFR in
cellular metabolism is challenged by our findings, since an
unrelated dehydrogenase of the SDR family may fulfill the function
classically assumed by a DHFR. It has already been reported
that a number of bacteria and some archaea appear to lack a
DHFR gene (
9), but the substitute function had not yet been
identified in any of these organisms. A bifunctional DHPR/DHFR
such as DH
Tt is clearly a good candidate for the agent responsible
for this substitute function. Moreover, just as thymidylate
may be synthesized by a classical ThyA protein or by a quite
unrelated ThyX flavoprotein (
9), it appears that the concomitant
reduction of FH
2 or various pteridines may be carried out by
an enzyme without a flavin prosthetic group (like DH
Tt or the
nonquinonoid pteridine reductase PTR1 of
Leishmania major [
2])
or by an unrelated flavoprotein, as in
E. coli. The evolutionary
origin of these functional redundancies is an intriguing question;
temperature by itself is not likely to be the discriminating
evolutionary factor, since
T. maritima DHFR and DH
Tt are both
thermophilic enzymes.
The role of DHTt as dihydropteridine reductase in Thermus is not known. In particular, whether Thermus possesses aromatic amino acid hydroxylases using a tetrahydropterin as a cofactor (see the introduction and reference 21) remains to be investigated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by concerted actions of the Belgian
State and the Free University of Brussels.
We thank J. Van Beeumen (University of Ghent) for DHPR N-terminal sequence determination and A. Henne for a personal communication. We also thank Jean-Pierre ten Have for the layout of the figures.

FOOTNOTES
* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Microbiology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, B-1070 Brussels, Belgium. Phone: 32 2 526 72 75. Fax: 32 2 526 72 73. E-mail:
nglansdo{at}vub.ac.be.

Present address: Department of Human Genetics, KULeuven/VIB, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium. 
Present address: Diabetes Research Center, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, B-1090 Brussels, Belgium. 

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Journal of Bacteriology, January 2004, p. 351-355, Vol. 186, No. 2
0021-9193/04/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JB.186.2.351-355.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
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