Halide Binding and Inhibition of Laccase Copper Clusters: The Role of Reorganization Energy

Laccase-like proteins are multicopper oxidases involved in several biological and industrial processes. Their application is commonly limited due to inhibition by fluoride and chloride, and as-isolated proteins are often substantially activated by heat, suggesting that multiple redox states can complicate characterization. Understanding these processes at the molecular level is thus desirable but theoretically unexplored. This paper reports systematic calculations of geometries, reorganization energies, and ionization energies for all partly oxidized states of the trinuclear copper clusters in realistic models with similar to 200 atoms. Corrections for scalar-relativistic effects, dispersion, and thermal effects were estimated. Fluoride, chloride, hydroxide, or water was bound to the T2 copper site of the oxidized resting state, and the peroxo intermediate was also computed for reference. Antiferromagnetic coupling, assigned oxidation states, and general structures were consistent with known spectroscopic data. The computations show that (i) ligands bound to the T2 site substantially increase the reorganization energy of the second reduction of the resting state and reduce the redox potentials, providing a possible mechanism for inhibition; (ii) the reorganization energy is particularly large for F- but also high for Cl-, consistent with the experimental tendency of inhibition; (iii) reduction leads to release of Cl- from the T2 site, suggesting a mechanism for heat/reduction activation of laccases by dissociation of inhibiting halides or hydroxide from T2.