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Quantitative Method to Investigate the Balance between Metabolism and Proteome Biomass: Starting from Glycine
Author(s) -
Gu Haiwei,
Carroll Patrick A.,
Du Jianhai,
Zhu Jiangjiang,
Neto Fausto Carnevale,
Eisenman Robert N.,
Raftery Daniel
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
angewandte chemie
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1521-3757
pISSN - 0044-8249
DOI - 10.1002/ange.201609236
Subject(s) - amino acid , metabolism , glycine , proteome , endogeny , biochemistry , chemistry , urine , cell , biology
The balance between metabolism and biomass is very important in biological systems; however, to date there has been no quantitative method to characterize the balance. In this methodological study, we propose to use the distribution of amino acids in different domains to investigate this balance. It is well known that endogenous or exogenous amino acids in a biological system are either metabolized or incorporated into free amino acids (FAAs) or proteome amino acids (PAAs). Using glycine (Gly) as an example, we demonstrate a novel method to accurately determine the amounts of amino acids in various domains using serum, urine, and cell samples. As expected, serum and urine had very different distributions of FAA‐ and PAA‐Gly. Using Tet21N human neuroblastoma cells, we also found that Myc(oncogene)‐induced metabolic reprogramming included a higher rate of metabolizing Gly, which provides additional evidence that the metabolism of proliferating cells is adapted to facilitate producing new cells. It is therefore anticipated that our method will be very valuable for further studies of the metabolism and biomass balance that will lead to a better understanding of human cancers.