scholarly journals Metabolic constraints on nitrogen fixation by rhizobia in legume nodules

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolin C. M. Schulte ◽  
Khushboo Borah ◽  
Rachel M. Wheatley ◽  
Jason J. Terpolilli ◽  
Gerhard Saalbach ◽  
...  

AbstractRhizobia induce nodule formation on legume roots and differentiate into bacteroids, which use plant-derived dicarboxylates as energy and electron sources for reduction of atmospheric N2 into ammonia for secretion to plants. Using heterogeneous genome-scale datasets, we reconstructed a model of bacteroid metabolism to investigate the effects of varying dicarboxylate and oxygen supply on carbon and nitrogen allocation. Modelling and 13C metabolic flux analysis in bacteroids indicate that microaerobiosis restricts the decarboxylating arm of the TCA cycle and limits ammonia assimilation into glutamate. Catabolism of dicarboxylates induces a higher oxygen demand but also a higher NADH/NAD+ ratio compared to sugars. Carbon polymer synthesis and alanine secretion by bacteroids facilitate redox balance in microaerobic nodules with alanine secretion increasing as oxygen tension decreases. Our results provide a framework for understanding fundamental constraints on rhizobial metabolism during symbiotic nitrogen fixation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (31) ◽  
pp. eabh2433
Author(s):  
Carolin C. M. Schulte ◽  
Khushboo Borah ◽  
Rachel M. Wheatley ◽  
Jason J. Terpolilli ◽  
Gerhard Saalbach ◽  
...  

Rhizobia induce nodule formation on legume roots and differentiate into bacteroids, which catabolize plant-derived dicarboxylates to reduce atmospheric N2 into ammonia. Despite the agricultural importance of this symbiosis, the mechanisms that govern carbon and nitrogen allocation in bacteroids and promote ammonia secretion to the plant are largely unknown. Using a metabolic model derived from genome-scale datasets, we show that carbon polymer synthesis and alanine secretion by bacteroids facilitate redox balance in microaerobic nodules. Catabolism of dicarboxylates induces not only a higher oxygen demand but also a higher NADH/NAD+ ratio than sugars. Modeling and 13C metabolic flux analysis indicate that oxygen limitation restricts the decarboxylating arm of the tricarboxylic acid cycle, which limits ammonia assimilation into glutamate. By tightly controlling oxygen supply and providing dicarboxylates as the energy and electron source donors for N2 fixation, legumes promote ammonia secretion by bacteroids. This is a defining feature of rhizobium-legume symbioses.


2004 ◽  
Vol 70 (12) ◽  
pp. 7277-7287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Wittmann ◽  
Patrick Kiefer ◽  
Oskar Zelder

ABSTRACT Metabolic fluxes in the central metabolism were determined for lysine-producing Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 21526 with sucrose as a carbon source, providing an insight into molasses-based industrial production processes with this organism. For this purpose, 13C metabolic flux analysis with parallel studies on [1-13CFru]sucrose, [1-13CGlc]sucrose, and [13C6 Fru]sucrose was carried out. C. glutamicum directed 27.4% of sucrose toward extracellular lysine. The strain exhibited a relatively high flux of 55.7% (normalized to an uptake flux of hexose units of 100%) through the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP). The glucose monomer of sucrose was completely channeled into the PPP. After transient efflux, the fructose residue was mainly taken up by the fructose-specific phosphotransferase system (PTS) and entered glycolysis at the level of fructose-1,6-bisphosphate. Glucose-6-phosphate isomerase operated in the gluconeogenetic direction from fructose-6-phosphate to glucose-6-phosphate and supplied additional carbon (7.2%) from the fructose part of the substrate toward the PPP. This involved supply of fructose-6-phosphate from the fructose part of sucrose either by PTSMan or by fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase. C. glutamicum further exhibited a high tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle flux of 78.2%. Isocitrate dehydrogenase therefore significantly contributed to the total NADPH supply of 190%. The demands for lysine (110%) and anabolism (32%) were lower than the supply, resulting in an apparent NADPH excess. The high TCA cycle flux and the significant secretion of dihydroxyacetone and glycerol display interesting targets to be approached by genetic engineers for optimization of the strain investigated.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (14) ◽  
pp. i548-i557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Heinonen ◽  
Maria Osmala ◽  
Henrik Mannerström ◽  
Janne Wallenius ◽  
Samuel Kaski ◽  
...  

AbstractMotivationMetabolic flux balance analysis (FBA) is a standard tool in analyzing metabolic reaction rates compatible with measurements, steady-state and the metabolic reaction network stoichiometry. Flux analysis methods commonly place model assumptions on fluxes due to the convenience of formulating the problem as a linear programing model, while many methods do not consider the inherent uncertainty in flux estimates.ResultsWe introduce a novel paradigm of Bayesian metabolic flux analysis that models the reactions of the whole genome-scale cellular system in probabilistic terms, and can infer the full flux vector distribution of genome-scale metabolic systems based on exchange and intracellular (e.g. 13C) flux measurements, steady-state assumptions, and objective function assumptions. The Bayesian model couples all fluxes jointly together in a simple truncated multivariate posterior distribution, which reveals informative flux couplings. Our model is a plug-in replacement to conventional metabolic balance methods, such as FBA. Our experiments indicate that we can characterize the genome-scale flux covariances, reveal flux couplings, and determine more intracellular unobserved fluxes in Clostridium acetobutylicum from 13C data than flux variability analysis.Availability and implementationThe COBRA compatible software is available at github.com/markusheinonen/bamfa.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Basler ◽  
Alisdair R. Fernie ◽  
Zoran Nikoloski

Methodological and technological advances have recently paved the way for metabolic flux profiling in higher organisms, like plants. However, in comparison with omics technologies, flux profiling has yet to provide comprehensive differential flux maps at a genome-scale and in different cell types, tissues, and organs. Here we highlight the recent advances in technologies to gather metabolic labeling patterns and flux profiling approaches. We provide an opinion of how recent local flux profiling approaches can be used in conjunction with the constraint-based modeling framework to arrive at genome-scale flux maps. In addition, we point at approaches which use metabolomics data without introduction of label to predict either non-steady state fluxes in a time-series experiment or flux changes in different experimental scenarios. The combination of these developments allows an experimentally feasible approach for flux-based large-scale systems biology studies.


Life ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aqib Zafar Khan ◽  
Muhammad Bilal ◽  
Shahid Mehmood ◽  
Ashutosh Sharma ◽  
Hafiz M. N. Iqbal

In recent years, metabolic engineering of microorganisms has attained much research interest to produce biofuels and industrially pertinent chemicals. Owing to the relatively fast growth rate, genetic malleability, and carbon neutral production process, cyanobacteria has been recognized as a specialized microorganism with a significant biotechnological perspective. Metabolically engineering cyanobacterial strains have shown great potential for the photosynthetic production of an array of valuable native or non-native chemicals and metabolites with profound agricultural and pharmaceutical significance using CO2 as a building block. In recent years, substantial improvements in developing and introducing novel and efficient genetic tools such as genome-scale modeling, high throughput omics analyses, synthetic/system biology tools, metabolic flux analysis and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated nuclease (CRISPR/cas) systems have been made for engineering cyanobacterial strains. Use of these tools and technologies has led to a greater understanding of the host metabolism, as well as endogenous and heterologous carbon regulation mechanisms which consequently results in the expansion of maximum productive ability and biochemical diversity. This review summarizes recent advances in engineering cyanobacteria to produce biofuel and industrially relevant fine chemicals of high interest. Moreover, the development and applications of cutting-edge toolboxes such as the CRISPR-cas9 system, synthetic biology, high-throughput “omics”, and metabolic flux analysis to engineer cyanobacteria for large-scale cultivation are also discussed.


2015 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 12-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saratram Gopalakrishnan ◽  
Costas D. Maranas

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (Supplement_6) ◽  
pp. vi215-vi215
Author(s):  
Omkar Ijare ◽  
Jeanne Manalo ◽  
Martyn Sharpe ◽  
David Baskin ◽  
Kumar Pichumani

Abstract Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) is an aggressive form of brain tumor in children, comprising >10% of all pediatric brain tumors. The median survival after diagnosis is < 1 year. Since DIPG tumors infiltrate brainstem and pons, they are inoperable. Currently radiotherapy is the mainstay of treatment, and there is a great need for novel therapies for the treatment of DIPG. Cellular metabolism plays a key role in carcinogenesis, unravelling active metabolic pathways in DIPG would help in developing targeted therapies. Glucose and glutamine are the two major nutrients necessary for the growth and proliferation of cancer cells. In this study, we have investigated the glucose and glutamine metabolism in SF8628 DIPG cells using 1H/13C NMR and GC-MS based metabolic flux analysis. SF8628 cells were grown in DMEM containing 11.0 mM glucose, supplemented with 10% FBS, and 2.0 mM glutamine at 37 °C under humidified air and 5% CO2. When cells reached confluency (replicates = 4), treated with 11.0 mM [U-13C]glucose or 4.0 mM glutamine in DMEM (supplemented with 10% FBS). After 24 h, cells were harvested for NMR/GC-MS analysis. The 13C-isotopomer analysis revealed that SF8628 cells produced 25.26 ± 10.63% acetyl-CoA from [U-13C]glucose which is ~3.7 times higher than that produced from GBM cells (6.83 ± 0.76%; our previous work), suggesting that DIPGs are metabolically very active. [U-13C]glutamine metabolism showed that DIPG cells also have an active TCA cycle metabolism (citrate M+4; 40.07 ± 1.06%) and moderately active reductive carboxylation pathway (citrate M+5; 10.59 ± 1.13%). Inhibition of both glycolytic and glutaminolysis pathways will be valuable in developing treatment strategies for DIPGs and these studies are in progress.


2006 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 718-729 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yinjie J. Tang ◽  
Judy S. Hwang ◽  
David E. Wemmer ◽  
Jay D. Keasling

ABSTRACT The central metabolic fluxes of Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 were examined under carbon-limited (aerobic) and oxygen-limited (microaerobic) chemostat conditions, using 13C-labeled lactate as the sole carbon source. The carbon labeling patterns of key amino acids in biomass were probed using both gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Based on the genome annotation, a metabolic pathway model was constructed to quantify the central metabolic flux distributions. The model showed that the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle is the major carbon metabolism route under both conditions. The Entner-Doudoroff and pentose phosphate pathways were utilized primarily for biomass synthesis (with a flux below 5% of the lactate uptake rate). The anaplerotic reactions (pyruvate to malate and oxaloacetate to phosphoenolpyruvate) and the glyoxylate shunt were active. Under carbon-limited conditions, a substantial amount (9% of the lactate uptake rate) of carbon entered the highly reversible serine metabolic pathway. Under microaerobic conditions, fluxes through the TCA cycle decreased and acetate production increased compared to what was found for carbon-limited conditions, and the flux from glyoxylate to glycine (serine-glyoxylate aminotransferase) became measurable. Although the flux distributions under aerobic, microaerobic, and shake flask culture conditions were different, the relative flux ratios for some central metabolic reactions did not differ significantly (in particular, between the shake flask and aerobic-chemostat groups). Hence, the central metabolism of S. oneidensis appears to be robust to environmental changes. Our study also demonstrates the merit of coupling GC-MS with 13C NMR for metabolic flux analysis to reduce the use of 13C-labeled substrates and to obtain more-accurate flux values.


2014 ◽  
Vol 197 (5) ◽  
pp. 943-950 ◽  
Author(s):  
Le You ◽  
Lian He ◽  
Yinjie J. Tang

This study investigated metabolic responses inSynechocystissp. strain PCC 6803 to photosynthetic impairment. We used 3-(3,4-dichlorophenyl)-1,1-dimethylurea (DCMU; a photosystem II inhibitor) to block O2evolution and ATP/NADPH generation by linear electron flow. Based on13C-metabolic flux analysis (13C-MFA) and RNA sequencing, we have found thatSynechocystissp. PCC 6803 employs a unique photoheterotrophic metabolism. First, glucose catabolism forms a cyclic route that includes the oxidative pentose phosphate (OPP) pathway and the glucose-6-phosphate isomerase (PGI) reaction. Glucose-6-phosphate is extensively degraded by the OPP pathway for NADPH production and is replenished by the reversed PGI reaction. Second, the Calvin cycle is not fully functional, but RubisCO continues to fix CO2and synthesize 3-phosphoglycerate. Third, the relative flux through the complete tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle and succinate dehydrogenase is small under heterotrophic conditions, indicating that the newly discovered cyanobacterial TCA cycle (via the γ-aminobutyric acid pathway or α-ketoglutarate decarboxylase/succinic semialdehyde dehydrogenase) plays a minimal role in energy metabolism. Fourth, NAD(P)H oxidation and the cyclic electron flow (CEF) around photosystem I are the two main ATP sources, and the CEF accounts for at least 40% of total ATP generation from photoheterotrophic metabolism (without considering maintenance loss). This study not only demonstrates a new topology for carbohydrate oxidation but also provides quantitative insights into metabolic bioenergetics in cyanobacteria.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document