The Crystal Structure of the Manganese Superoxide Dismutase from Geobacillus stearothermophilus: Parker and Blake (1988) Revisited

Superoxide dismutase (SOD) is an almost ubiquitous metalloenzyme in aerobic organisms that catalyses the disproportionation of superoxide. Geobacillus stearothermophilus MnSOD is the only published MnSOD structure that does not have its coordinates publicly available, yet it is one of the more cited structures in the SOD literature. The structure has now been refined with modern programs, yielding a significantly improved structure which has been deposited in the Protein Data Bank. Importantly, the further refined structure reveals the presence of a catalytically important fifth ligand, water, to the metal centre, as observed in other SOD structures.