An elusive electron shuttle from a facultative anaerobe
- Harvard Medical School, United States
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, United States
Abstract
Some anaerobic bacteria use insoluble minerals as terminal electron acceptors and discovering the ways in which electrons move through the membrane barrier to the exterior acceptor forms an active field of research with implications for both bacterial physiology and bioenergy. A previous study suggested that Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 utilizes a small, polar, redox active molecule that serves as an electron shuttle between the bacteria and insoluble acceptors, but the shuttle itself has never been identified. Through isolation and synthesis, we identify it as ACNQ (2-amino-3-carboxy-1,4-naphthoquinone), a soluble analog of menaquinone. ACNQ is derived from DHNA (1,4-dihydroxy-2-naphthoic acid) in a non-enzymatic process that frustrated genetic approaches to identify the shuttle. Both ACNQ and DHNA restore reduction of AQDS under anaerobic growth in menaquinone-deficient mutants. Bioelectrochemistry analyses reveal that ACNQ (-0.32 VAg/AgCl) contributes to the extracellular electron transfer (EET) as an electron shuttle, without altering menaquinone generation or EET related cytochrome c expression.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (GM086258)
- Jon Clardy
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (AT980074)
- Jon Clardy
U.S. Department of Energy (DE-AC02-05CH11231)
- Caroline M Ajo-Franklin
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (5F32GM103010)
- Elissa Hobert
China Scholarship Council (201606090098)
- Lin Su
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Dianne K Newman, California Institute of Technology, United States
Version history
- Received: April 29, 2019
- Accepted: June 24, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 24, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 8, 2019 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2019, Mevers et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 4,514
- views
-
- 653
- downloads
-
- 57
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
An elusive electron shuttle from a facultative anaerobe
eLife 8:e48054.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.48054
Further reading
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
Transporter research primarily relies on the canonical substrates of well-established transporters. This approach has limitations when studying transporters for the low-abundant micromolecules, such as micronutrients, and may not reveal physiological functions of the transporters. While d-serine, a trace enantiomer of serine in the circulation, was discovered as an emerging biomarker of kidney function, its transport mechanisms in the periphery remain unknown. Here, using a multi-hierarchical approach from body fluids to molecules, combining multi-omics, cell-free synthetic biochemistry, and ex vivo transport analyses, we have identified two types of renal d-serine transport systems. We revealed that the small amino acid transporter ASCT2 serves as a d-serine transporter previously uncharacterized in the kidney and discovered d-serine as a non-canonical substrate of the sodium-coupled monocarboxylate transporters (SMCTs). These two systems are physiologically complementary, but ASCT2 dominates the role in the pathological condition. Our findings not only shed light on renal d-serine transport, but also clarify the importance of non-canonical substrate transport. This study provides a framework for investigating multiple transport systems of various trace micromolecules under physiological conditions and in multifactorial diseases.
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
- Cell Biology
Mediator of ERBB2-driven Cell Motility 1 (MEMO1) is an evolutionary conserved protein implicated in many biological processes; however, its primary molecular function remains unknown. Importantly, MEMO1 is overexpressed in many types of cancer and was shown to modulate breast cancer metastasis through altered cell motility. To better understand the function of MEMO1 in cancer cells, we analyzed genetic interactions of MEMO1 using gene essentiality data from 1028 cancer cell lines and found multiple iron-related genes exhibiting genetic relationships with MEMO1. We experimentally confirmed several interactions between MEMO1 and iron-related proteins in living cells, most notably, transferrin receptor 2 (TFR2), mitoferrin-2 (SLC25A28), and the global iron response regulator IRP1 (ACO1). These interactions indicate that cells with high MEMO1 expression levels are hypersensitive to the disruptions in iron distribution. Our data also indicate that MEMO1 is involved in ferroptosis and is linked to iron supply to mitochondria. We have found that purified MEMO1 binds iron with high affinity under redox conditions mimicking intracellular environment and solved MEMO1 structures in complex with iron and copper. Our work reveals that the iron coordination mode in MEMO1 is very similar to that of iron-containing extradiol dioxygenases, which also display a similar structural fold. We conclude that MEMO1 is an iron-binding protein that modulates iron homeostasis in cancer cells.
