Construction and characterization of double mutants in nitrogenase of<Emphasis Type="Italic">Klebsiella pneumoniae</Emphasis>

Two mutants in nitrogenase of Klebsiella pneu-moniae are constructed by site-directed mutagenesis and gene replacement procedure, which express the nitrogenases with Lysine and Glutamine substituting for a-Glutamine 190 and a-Histidine 194 respectively (Kp-Q a190 K and Kp-H a194 Q). The above two substitutions are respectively intro-duced into a nifV mutant (expressing a citrate-containing nitrogenase) and sequentially two double mutants are ob-tained (Kp-Q a190 K-nifV- and Kp-H a194 Q-nifV-). All four mutants exhibit strict Nif- phenotype under the N2-fixation condition and fail to grow diazotrophically. Altered ni-trogneases are effectively depressed and the C2H2 reduction analysis shows that the double substitutions in Kp-Q a190 K-nifV abolish cell C2H2 reduction activity, but Kp-H a194 Q-nifV- cells maintain a C2H2 reduction activity at 10% of that of wild type. Whole cell C2D2 reduction by all four mu-tants in comparison to the wild type and nifV mutant is also detected. The results show that only single a-Gln194 substitu-tion does not perturb the stereospecificity of protonation of C2D2. These results indicate that the a- Glutamine 190 and its combination with homocitrate are essential to the catalytic activity of nitrogenase and it is proposed that a-Glutamine 190 and its combination with homocitrate are involved in the proton and/or electron transfer to FeMoco. The nitrogenases from these double mutants will be useful in further analysis of the entry of the proton and/or electron to FeMoco and the substrate binding sites.