The Increasingly Complex Mechanism of HMG-CoA Reductase

HMG-CoA reductase (HMGR) is the target of statins, cholesterol-lowering drugs prescribed to millions of patients worldwide. More recent research indicates that HMGR could be a useful target in the development of antimicrobial agents. Over the last seven decades, researchers have proposed a series of increasingly complex reaction mechanisms for this biomedically important enzyme.The maturation of the mechanistic proposals for HMGR have paralleled advances in a diverse set of research areas, such as molecular biology and computational chemistry. Thus, the development of the HMGR mechanism provides a useful case study for following the advances in state-of-the-art methods in enzyme mechanism research. Similarly, the questions raised by these mechanism proposals reflect the limitations of the methods used to develop them.The mechanism of HMGR, a four-electron oxidoreductase, is unique and far more complex than originally thought. The reaction contains multiple chemical steps, coupled to large-scale domain mot...