Importance of aspartic acid side chain carboxylate‐arginine interaction in substrate selection of arginine 2,3‐aminomutase BlsG

The fungicide nucleoside blasticidin S features a β‐arginine, a moiety seldom revealed in the structure of natural products. BlsG, a radical SAM arginine‐2,3‐aminomutase from the blasticidin S biosynthetic pathway, displayed promiscuous activity to three basic amino acids. Here in this study, we demonstrated that BlsG showed high preference toward its natural substrate arginine. The combined structural modeling, steady‐state kinetics, and mutational analyses lead to the detailed understanding of the substrate recognition of BlsG. A single mutation of T340D changed the substrate preference of BlsG leading to a little more preference to lysine than arginine. On the basis of our understanding of the substrate selection of BlsG and bioinformatic analysis, we propose that the D…D motif locationally corresponding to D293 and D330 of KAM is characteristic of lysine 2,3‐aminomutase while the corresponding D…T motif is characteristic of arginine 2,3‐aminomutase. The study may provide a simple way to discern the arginine 2,3‐aminomutase and thus lead to the discovery of new natural compounds with β‐arginine moiety.