Understanding Resistance Mechanism of Protoporphyrinogen Oxidase-Inhibiting Herbicides: Insights from Computational Mutation Scanning and Site-Directed Mutagenesis

The potential of protoporphyrinogen oxidase (PPO) to develop resistance against five PPO-inhibiting herbicides has been studied using computational mutation scanning (CMS) protocol, leading to valuable insights into the resistance mechanisms and structure-resistance relationship of the PPO inhibitors. The calculated shifts in the binding free energies caused by the mutations correlated very well with those derived from the corresponding experimental data obtained from site-directed mutagenesis of PPO, leading to valuable insights into the resistance mechanisms of PPO inhibitors. The calculated entropy change was related to the conformational flexibility of the inhibitor, which demonstrated that inhibitors with appropriate conformational flexibility may inhibit both the wild type and mutants simultaneously. The reasonable correlation between the computational and experimental data further validate that CMS protocol is valuable for predicting resistance associated with amino acid mutations on target proteins.