. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2023 May 2.

Published in final edited form as: Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2011 May 25;384(4-5):331–339. doi: 10.1007/s00210-011-0651-9

Table 1.

Nucleoside diphosphate kinase (NDPK) activity of NDPK/Nm23/Awd

Features:

• Catalyzes the -phosphorylation of nucleoside 5’-diphosphates to corresponding triphosphates, via a phosphohistidine intermediate:
(1) N₁TP + NDPK ↔ N₁DP + NDPK-P
(2) NDPK-P + N₂DP ↔ N₂TP + NDPK

• Found as tetramers and hexamers; crystal structures reported.

• Found in all subcellular compartments

• Postulated to maintain nucleotide pools, activate G-proteins, induce a mutator phenotype, regulate microtubule dynamics.

Concerns:

• Displays little specificity for different nucleotide bases (Mourad and Parks, 1966, Dumas et al., 1992).

• NDPK activity of vector- versus Nm23 transfectants comparable (MacDonald et al., 1993, Otero et al., 1999).

• Other enzymes have overlapping functions in maintaining nucleotide pools (Lu and Inouye, 1996, Zhang et al., 2002).

• Direct G-protein activation by NDPK-mediated GTP formation from bound GDP retracted (Randazzo et al., 1992).

• Mutator activity dissociated from nucleotide pool levels (Nordman and Wright, 2008).