Charles Cuttino | 2026 I.S. Symposium
Name: Charles Cuttino
Title: Assessing substrate specificity in 6-hydroxynicotinic acid 3-monooxygenase: the effects of 5-hydroxypicolinic acid and 6-chloro-5-hydroxypicolinic acid as NicC substrates
Major: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Advisor: Mark Snider
My IS project focuses on substrate specificity in NicC, an enzyme used by soil-dwelling bacteria to break down nicotinic acid for energy. While NicC is known to process 6-hydroxynicotinic acid as its primary substrate, I was curious to see whether NicC could process other similar substrate analogues. To look into this, I tested two novel substrate analogues: 5-hydroxypicolinic acid and 6-chloro-5-hydroxypicolinic acid. What excites me most about this research is the discovery that NicC is more versatile than previously thought. I found that NicC can process both substrate analogues. This discovery provides fascinating mechanistic insights into how the NicC recognizes its substrates and promotes its reactions. The next steps for this research involves a more extensive kinetic analysis of the oxidative half reaction for both substrates to see how NicC catalyzes these substrate analogues, as well as developing variants of NicC and assessing whether this changes how NicC catalyzes substrate analogues. Overall, these findings suggest that NicC has the potential to eventually be utilized as a bioremediatory enzyme, helping to clean up synthetic chemical pollutants in soil that resemble NicC substrates. The insights from this project help further enhance our understanding of how NicC catalyzes its reaction biochemically, getting us closer to the overarching goal of using NicC for bioremediatory purposes.
Posted in Symposium 2026 on May 1, 2026.
