IdentHication and functional analysis of cysteine-90

Treatment of murine leukaemia virus reverse transcriptase with benzophenone 4-maleimide inactivates DNA polymerase activity, but has no effect on the RNAase H function. Kinetic measurements indicated that benzophenone 4-maleimide is a competitive inhibitor with respect to template-primer binding, but is non-competitive with respect to dNTP binding. Enzyme modified with benzophenone 4-maleimide cannot bind templateprimer or primer alone, as judged by u.v.-mediated cross-linking of radiolabelled substrates. Of the eight cysteine residues in murine leukaemia virus reverse transcriptase, only two were modified by benzophenone 4-maleimide, which were identified as Cys-90 and Cys-310 by comparative tryptic-peptide mapping and amino acid composition analysis. Inclusion of template-