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Ultrasensitive regulation of anapleurosis via allosteric activation of PEP carboxylase

Nature Chemical Biology volume 8, pages 562–568 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Anapleurosis is the filling of the tricarboxylic acid cycle with four-carbon units. The common substrate for both anapleurosis and glucose phosphorylation in bacteria is the terminal glycolytic metabolite phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP). Here we show that Escherichia coli quickly and almost completely turns off PEP consumption upon glucose removal. The resulting buildup of PEP is used to quickly import glucose if it becomes available again. The switch-like termination of anapleurosis results from depletion of fructose-1,6-bisphosphate (FBP), an ultrasensitive allosteric activator of PEP carboxylase. E. coli expressing an FBP-insensitive point mutant of PEP carboxylase grow normally when glucose is steadily available. However, they fail to build up PEP upon glucose removal, grow poorly when glucose availability oscillates and suffer from futile cycling at the PEP node on gluconeogenic substrates. Thus, bacterial central carbon metabolism is intrinsically programmed with ultrasensitive allosteric regulation to enable rapid adaptation to changing environmental conditions.

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Figure 1: Glucose removal results in PEP buildup.
Figure 2: PEP carboxylase is inhibited by 99% upon glucose removal.
Figure 3: Activation of PEP carboxylase by FBP is enhanced by physiological concentrations of acetyl-CoA and aspartate.
Figure 4: PEP accumulation upon glucose removal enables rapid import of glucose when it reappears.
Figure 5: The FBP-insensitive variant of PEP carboxylase causes futile cycling on gluconeogenic medium.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Princeton University colleagues C. Doucette for the ppc deletion strain and A. Hottes for the pCA24N-ppc plasmid; J. Park for the flux calculations; A. Michaelis and Z. Gitai for the microscopy; D. Perlman, W. Lu, K. Saw and H. Shwe for protein mass spectrometry; and N. Wingreen for helpful discussions. This research was funded by US National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award MCB-0643859, Joint US Department of Energy–Air Force Office of Scientific Research award DOE DE-SC0002077–AFOSR FA9550-09-1-0580, the US National Institutes of Health Center for Quantitative Biology award P50 GM071508 and NSF grant CBET-0941143. M.L.R. was supported by NSF Graduate Research Fellowship DGE-0646086.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA

    Yi-Fan Xu, Daniel Amador-Noguez, Marshall Louis Reaves & Joshua D Rabinowitz

  2. Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA

    Yi-Fan Xu, Xiao-Jiang Feng & Joshua D Rabinowitz

  3. Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA

    Marshall Louis Reaves

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Contributions

Y.-F.X. and J.D.R. designed experiments, analyzed data and wrote the paper. D.A.-N. and M.L.R. performed preliminary experiments and contributed to discussion. X.-J.F. contributed to modeling.

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Correspondence to Joshua D Rabinowitz.

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Xu, YF., Amador-Noguez, D., Reaves, M. et al. Ultrasensitive regulation of anapleurosis via allosteric activation of PEP carboxylase. Nat Chem Biol 8, 562–568 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.941

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