Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences (Jun 2023)

Dynamic allostery in thrombin—a review

  • Elizabeth A. Komives

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fmolb.2023.1200465
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10

Abstract

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Thrombin is a serine protease that catalyzes a large number of different reactions including proteolytic cleave of fibrinogen to make the fibrin clot (procoagulant activity), of the protease activated receptors (for cell signaling) and of protein C generating activated protein C (anticoagulant activity). Thrombin has an effector binding site called the anion binding exosite 1 that is allosterically coupled to the active site. In this review, we survey results from thermodynamic characterization of the allosteric coupling as well as hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry to reveal which parts of the thrombin structure are changed upon effector binding and/or mutagenesis, and finally NMR spectroscopy to characterize the different timescales of motions elicited by the effectors. We also relate the experimental work to computational network analysis of the thrombin-thrombomodulin complex.

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