Use of Protein‐Mediated Lipid Exchange in the Study of Membrane‐Bound Enzymes

The ability of liver lipid‐exchange proteins to introduce foreign phospholipids into microsomes was used in a study of the lipid dependence of glucose‐6‐phosphatase. Supplementation of intact rat liver and hepatoma microsomes with exogeneous aminophospholipids prevents the decline of glucose‐6‐phosphatase activity during incubation, whereas the introduction of exogeneous phosphatidylcholine has no protective effect. On the contrary with deoxycholate‐disrupted hepatoma microsomes, introduction of additional phosphatidylcholine causes activation while phosphatidyl‐ethanolamine has only little effect. The results are explained by assuming that the transport unit and the catalytic moiety of the glucose‐6‐phosphatase system have different lipid requirements, the activity of the former protein depending mainly on phosphatidylethanolamine and phosphatidylserine and that of the catalytic protein depending on phosphatidylcholine. In deoxycholate‐disrupted liver microsomes (in which both the glucose‐6‐phosphatase activity and the phosphatidylcholine content are much higher than in hepatoma microsomes) incubation with phosphatidylcholine and lipid‐exchange proteins alters neither the phospholipid composition nor the enzyme activity. This suggests that the diminished activity of glucose‐6‐phosphatase in hepatomas may be partly due to a low level of phosphatidylcholine.