Kinetics of the reduction of horse heart ferricytochrome c. Ascorbate reduction in the presence and absence of urea.

The reduction of horse heart cytochrome c with ascorbate in the absence of urea and in its presence, 0 to 8 M, pH 7.0, has been investigated using a stopped flow technique and the absorptivity at 550 nm as the monitoring probes, and by using the rate of oxidizability with molecular oxygen. Reduction is found to be consistent with a mechanism involving (i) a urea-dependent equilibrium step between an ascorbate-reducible and an irreducible form, with a [urea]1/2 of 7.5 M and a reversion rate constant of 0.05 +/- 0.02 s-1, (ii) the binding of ascorbate to cytochrome c, with a binding constant of 5.9 M-1 in the absence of urea which decreases to a value of 2.7 M-1 above 5.5 M urea, and (iii) a reduction step, with a urea-independent rate constant of 2.9 +/- 0.3 s-1. This scheme is interpreted in terms of an electron-transfer pathway involving neither the classical "adjacent" attack nor attack at the exposed heme edge, i.e. "remote" attack, but rather, through an alternate pathway involving binding at some site other than the heme crevice opening and a migration path of rather low electron-transfer efficiency. The urea-linked ascorbate reduction step is th X2 in equilibrium D step of the urea denaturation mechanism (Myer, Y. P., MacDonald L. H., Verma, B. C., and Pande, A. J. (1980) Biochemistry 19, 199-207), and the 9 M urea form, D, is the irreducible form. Form X2 and the other intermediate form, X1, are found to be reducible directly by ascorbate, and not through reversion to the native form of the protein. both the integrity of the heme crevice and the polypeptide-organized structures are of little importance as far as ascorbate reducibility is concerned, but the integrity of the structural and protein functional changes reflecting the X2 in equilibrium D step of the mechanism directly or indirectly determines the reducibility of the protein.