Polysaccharide monooxygenases (PMOs), also known as lytic PMOs (LPMOs), enhance the depolymerization of recalcitrant polysaccharides by hydrolytic enzymes and are found in the majority of cellulolytic fungi and actinomycete bacteria. For more than a decade, PMOs were incorrectly annotated as family 61 glycoside hydrolases (GH61s) or family 33 carbohydrate-binding modules (CBM33s). PMOs have an unusual surface-exposed active site with a tightly bound Cu(II) ion that catalyzes the regioselective hydroxylation of crystalline cellulose, leading to glycosidic bond cleavage. The genomes of some cellulolytic fungi contain more than 20 genes encoding cellulose-active PMOs, suggesting a diversity of biological activities. PMOs show great promise in reducing the cost of conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fermentable sugars; however, many questions remain about their reaction mechanism and biological function. This review addresses, in depth, the structural and mechanistic aspects of oxidative depolymerization of cellulose by PMOs and considers their biological function and phylogenetic diversity.

Significance: Polysaccharide monooxygenases (PMOs) are recently discovered extracellular fungal and bacterial enzymes that are able to cleave the recalcitrant polysaccharides cellulose and chitin. We describe the discovery of a new family of fungal PMOs that act on starch based on bioinformatic, biochemical, and spectroscopic studies on NCU8746, a representative starch-active PMO from Neurospora crassa . The data support a proposed enzymatic mechanism and show that NCU08746 shares evolutionarily conserved features with previously reported PMOs. This discovery extends the currently known PMO family, suggesting the existence of a PMO superfamily with a much broader range of substrates. Starch-active PMOs provide an expanded perspective on studies of starch metabolism and may have potential in the food and starch-based biofuel industries.

Deoxyhypusine hydroxylase is the key enzyme in the biosynthesis of hypusine containing eukaryotic translation initiation factor 5A (eIF5A), which plays an essential role in the regulation of cell proliferation. Recombinant human deoxyhypusine hydroxylase (hDOHH) has been reported to have oxygen- and iron-dependent activity, an estimated iron/holoprotein stoichiometry of 2, and a visible band at 630 nm responsible for the blue color of the as-isolated protein. EPR, Mössbauer, and XAS spectroscopic results presented herein provide direct spectroscopic evidence that hDOHH has an antiferromagnetically coupled diiron center with histidines and carboxylates as likely ligands, as suggested by mutagenesis experiments. Resonance Raman experiments show that its blue chromophore arises from a (μ-1,2-peroxo)diiron(III) center that forms in the reaction of the reduced enzyme with O ₂ , so the peroxo form of hDOHH is unusually stable. Nevertheless we demonstrate that it can carry out the hydroxylation of the deoxyhypusine residue present in the elF5A substrate. Despite a lack of sequence similarity, hDOHH has a nonheme diiron active site that resembles both in structure and function those found in methane and toluene monooxygenases, bacterial and mammalian ribonucleotide reductases, and stearoyl acyl carrier protein Δ ⁹ -desaturase from plants, suggesting that the oxygen-activating diiron motif is a solution arrived at by convergent evolution. Notably, hDOHH is the only example thus far of a human hydroxylase with such a diiron active site.