Probing the substrate specificity for lipases. II. Kinetic and modeling studies on the molecular recognition of 2-arylpropionic esters by Candida rugosa and Rhizomucor miehei lipases

Racemic arylpropionic esters 1–3, precursors of therapeutically important non-steroidal antiinflammatory drugs, were subjected to hydrolyses in the presence of either Candida rugosa or Rhizomucor miehei crude lipases. The hydrolyses of 1 and 2 proved to be highly enantioselective, whereas 3 was not transformed at all. Both the substrate specificity and the enantioselectivity of these lipases were explained through a molecular modeling study involving docking experiments between 1–3 and the amino acids forming the enzymes active-sites, whose three-dimensional structures were obtained from X-ray crystallographic data, followed by extensive conformational analysis on their computer-generated complexes. The results of this study also account for the high enantioselective and good yielding hydrolysis of 3 (as the corresponding 2-chloroethyl ester) catalyzed by CRL pretreated with 2-propanol, recently reported in the literature, and lead to admit that such a treatment may operate very deep conformational changes on the amino acids of the enzyme active-site.