Abstract: | Oxygen-18 exchange out of 18O]Pi catalyzed by Mg2+-activated unadenylated glutamine synthetase from was followed by 31P-NMR in the presence of the other substrates, ADP and L-glutamine. The pattern of the in the species P18O4, P18O316O1, P18O216O2, P18O116O3, P16O4 during the exchange followed a binomial distribution consistent with indiscriminate removal of any of the four oxygens of Pi. The rate constant for exchange was 410±40 min?1 while the rate constant for net reaction (ATP formation) was 62±4 min?1. Thus exchange proceeds ~7 times faster than net reaction, a finding in accord with that of Stokes and Boyer ( (1976) , 5558) for the Mn2+-activated adenylylated glutamine synthetase. A model for the overall catalytic events first derived from rapid kinetic fluorescence experiments (Rhee and Chock, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, (1976) , 476) was successfully used to fit the oxygen exchange data in this paper. |