Radical SAM enzymes: surprises along the path to understanding mechanism

As the field of radical SAM enzymology has grown from a few examples in the 1990s to hundreds of thousands today, a fundamental question has remained: how does Nature use S-adenosyl-l-methionine to initiate radical reactions? This was a driving question when we first began studying pyruvate formate-lyase activating enzyme in 1993, and our journey for answers has brought us to many surprising discoveries, from the direct coordination of SAM to a unique iron in a [4Fe-4S] cluster, to our recent discovery of an organometallic intermediate and our ability to quantitatively produce and characterize the long-sought 5 '-deoxyadenosyl radical intermediate. These adventures and what we have learned along the way about this fundamentally novel chemistry is described in this review. Graphic abstract