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How do microbes control their metabolic operation
Author(s) -
Sauer Uwe
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.27.1_supplement.87.1
Subject(s) - allosteric regulation , flux (metallurgy) , function (biology) , computational biology , metabolomics , biology , metabolic network , metabolic flux analysis , transcriptional regulation , transcription factor , metabolism , enzyme , chemistry , microbiology and biotechnology , biochemistry , bioinformatics , gene , organic chemistry
While our knowledge on regulation events is steadily increasing, we are much less informed about the functionality of individual regulation events and their quantitative relevance for controlling a given biological function. For metabolism this function is the flux of small molecules that can be quantified network‐wide through methods of 13C‐flux analysis (1). This ability to quantify metabolic function allows us to investigate the question which of the multiple overlapping regulation mechanisms are employed by microbial cells to manage their small molecule traffic (2, 3). By combining various omics methods with computational analysis, we delineate actively controlling regulation events from the much larger number of co‐occurring regulation events. From large‐scale 13C‐flux experiments with deletion mutants in different microbes we found, somewhat surprisingly, that only few transcription factors are actively involved in controlling the distribution of flux in the network. Here I will discuss the relevance of enzyme phosphorylation in controlling fluxes through yeast central metabolism and of allosteric metabolite‐enzyme interactions in controlling E. coli fluxes.