{"doi":"10.1101/2024.04.10.588772","title":"Ovoselenol, a Selenium-containing Antioxidant Derived from Convergent Evolution","abstract":"Selenium is an essential micronutrient, but its presence in biology has been limited to protein and nucleic acid biopolymers. The recent identification of the first biosynthetic pathway for selenium-containing small molecules suggests that there is a larger family of selenometabolites that remains to be discovered. Using a bioinformatic search strategy that relies on mapping of composite active site motifs, we identify a recently evolved branch of abundant and uncharacterized metalloenzymes that we predict are involved in selenometabolite biosynthesis. Biochemical studies confirm this prediction and show that these enzymes form an unusual C-Se bond onto histidine, thus giving rise to a novel selenometabolite and potent antioxidant that we have termed ovoselenol. Aside from providing insights into the evolution of this enzyme class and the structural basis of C-Se bond formation, our work offers a blueprint for charting the microbial selenometabolome in the future.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2024,"id":496478,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.948,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":948931,"name":"Kendra A. Ireland","orcid":"0000-0003-0986-5142","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1228147,"name":"Vanessa Y. Ying","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":777107,"name":"Katherine M. Davis","orcid":"0000-0002-0258-8907","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":322437,"name":"Mohammad R. Seyedsayamdost","orcid":"0000-0003-2707-4854","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1066733,"name":"Chase M. Kayrouz","orcid":"0000-0001-6754-422X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":50,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:09:27.134858Z","pmid":"38645211","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}