Trichloroethylene oxidation by purified toluene 2-monooxygenase: products, kinetics, turnover-dependent inactivation

Trichloroethylene is oxidized by several types of nonspecific bacterial oxygenases. Toluene 2-monooxygenase from Burkholderia cepacia G4 is implicated in trichloroethylene oxidation and is uniquely suggested to be resistant to turnover-dependent inactivation in vivo. In this work, the oxidation of trichloroethylene was studied with purified toluene 2-monooxygenase. All three purified toluene 2-monooxygenase protein compo-nents and NADH were required to reconstitute full trichloroethylene oxidation activity in vitro. The apparent Km and Vmax were 12 mM and 37 nmol per min per mg of hydroxylase component, respectively. Ten percent of the full activity was obtained when the small-molecular-weight enzyme component was omitted. The stable oxidation products, accounting for 84 % of the trichloroethylene oxidized, were carbon monoxide, formic acid, glyoxylic acid, and covalently modified oxygenase proteins that constituted 12 % of the reacted [14C]trichloro-ethylene. The stable oxidation products may all derive from the unstable intermediate trichloroethylene epoxide that was trapped by reaction with 4-(p-nitrobenzyl)pyridine. Chloral hydrate and dichloroacetic acid were not detected. This finding differs from that with soluble methane monooxygenase and cytochrome P-450 monooxygenase, which produce chloral hydrate. Trichloroethylene-dependent inactivation of toluene 2-mono-oxygenase activity was observed. All of the protein components were covalently modified during the oxidation of trichloroethylene. The addition of cysteine to reaction mixtures partially protected the enzyme syste