Groundworks for an evolutionary biochemistry: The iron-sulphur world

Pyruvate ferredoxin oxidoreductase and its radical intermediate.

Coenzyme A (CoA) is a ubiquitous and essential cofactor that is involved in a large proportion of all central metabolic reactions. In most of these reactions, the cofactor acts as an acyl carrier, and either activates the acyl group for group transfer or electrophilic attack, or increases the acidity of the protons adjacent to the carbonyl to facilitate the formation of a nucleophilic enolate. This chapter describes the discovery of CoA and the early studies on its biosynthesis and enzymology, and the current status of our knowledge of its universal five-step biosynthetic pathway from pantothenic acid (vitamin B5) – including an overview of the variations in the pathway across sequenced genomes, and of the data on the essentiality of the genes encoding the CoA biosynthetic enzymes. This chapter also discusses CoA enzymology, with a special focus on enzymes that consume, degrade, and recycle CoA, on enzymes that biosynthesize CoA thioesters, and on enzymes that subsequently use these thioesters for group transfer reactions. The enzymology of proteins that act in the Claisen condensation of CoA thioesters (and the retro-Claisen cleavage reactions), is also described. Finally, an overview of the use of CoA analogues in biotechnological applications and in the design and development of drugs and enzyme inhibitors is provided.

Coenzyme A Biosynthesis and Enzymology

In the first half of the twentieth century, despite war, oppression and other social upheavals, two sets of research programmes, carried out by an international array of outstanding scientists, laid the foundations of much of modern biochemistry and cell physiology. One of the central questions asked and answered was: how do organisms generate energy? Many of the relevant experiments were on yeasts. Much earlier, in 1861, Louis Pasteur1 (see the second article of this series [10]) had studied the utilization of sugars by yeasts. He had found that the growth yield per gram of sugar consumed was up

A history of research on yeasts 6: the main respiratory pathway

https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1016/0014-5793%2888%2980425-3

The conversion of phosphoserine residues to selenocysteine residues on an opal suppressor tRNA and casein

I was born in the middle of the last year of the last century, in the city of Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia. It is now Russian and its name is Kaliningrad. I lived through the two world wars and was lucky to leave Germany in 1931 to live in Denmark, where I worked for seven years. In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the second world war, I got the opportunity to come and settle in the United States when I was already 40 years old. My work was not unknown, but also not well known.

/pdf/a-long-life-in-times-of-great-upheaval-4myn2tlnqu.pdf

Fritz Lipmann

Papers

A Long Life in Times of Great Upheaval