The construction of more stable proteins is important in biomolecular engineering, particularly in the design of biologics based therapeutics. We show here that replacing the tyrosine at position 18 (Y18) of T4 lysozyme with the unnatural amino acid meta-chlorotyrosine (^mClY) increases both the thermal stability (raising the melting temperature by ~1°C and melting enthalpy by 3 kcal/mol) and enzymatic activity at elevated temperatures (15% higher than the parent enzyme at 40°C) of this classic enzyme. The chlorine of ^mClY forms a halogen bond (XB) to the carbonyl oxygen of the peptide bond at glycine 28 (G28) in a tight loop near the active site. In this case, the XB potential of the typically weak XB donor Cl is shown from quantum chemical calculations to be significantly enhanced by polarization via an intramolecular hydrogen bond (HB) from the adjacent hydroxyl substituent of the tyrosyl side-chain, resulting in a distinctive synergistic HB enhanced XB (or HeX-B for short) interaction. The larger halogens (bromine and iodine) are not well accommodated within this same loop and, consequently, do not exhibit the effects on protein stability or function associated with the HeX-B interaction. Thus, we have for the first time demonstrated that an XB can be engineered to stabilize and increase the activity of an enzyme, with the increased stabilizing potential of the HeX-B further extending the application of halogenated amino acids in the design of more stable protein therapeutics.

Genetic code expansion has provided the ability to site-specifically incorporate a multitude of noncanonical amino acids (ncAAs) into proteins for a wide variety of applications, but low ncAA incorporation efficiency can hamper the utility of this powerful technology. When investigating proteins containing the post-translational modification 3-nitro-tyrosine (nitroTyr), we developed second-generation amino-acyl tRNA synthetases (RS) that incorporate nitroTyr at efficiencies roughly an order of magnitude greater than those previously reported and that advanced our ability to elucidate the role of elevated cellular nitroTyr levels in human disease (e.g., Franco, M. et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A 2013, 110, E1102). Here, we explore the origins of the improvement achieved in these second-generation RSs. Crystal structures of the most efficient of these synthetases reveal the molecular basis for the enhanced efficiencies observed in the second-generation nitroTyr-RSs. Although Tyr is not detectably incorporated into proteins when expression media is supplemented with 1 mM nitroTyr, a major difference between the first- and second-generation RSs is that the second-generation RSs have an active site more compatible with Tyr binding. This feature of the second-generation nitroTyr-RSs appears to be the result of using less stringent criteria when selecting from a library of mutants. The observation that a different selection strategy performed on the same library of mutants produced nitroTyr-RSs with dramatically improved efficiencies suggests the optimization of established selection protocols could lead to notable improvements in ncAA-RS efficiencies and thus the overall utility of this technology.